UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
AT   LOS  ANGELES 


MEN    AND    MATTERS 


BY  THE  SAME  AC/THOK 

THE  LIFE  OF  JOHN  HENRY  CARDINAL 
NEWMAN.  Based  on  his  Private  Journals  and 
Correspondence.  With  15  Portraits  and  Illustra- 
tions.    2  vols.     8vo,  36J.  net. 

Cheap  Edition.    With  New  Prefatory  Matter  and 
2  Portraits.     2  vols.     8vo,  12s.  6d.  net. 

THE  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  CARDINAL 
WISEMAN.  With  3  Portraits.  2  vols.  Crown 
8vo,  ior.  net. 

AUBREY  DE  VERE :  a  Memoir  based  on  his 
Unpublished  Diaries  and  Correspondence. 
With  2  Photogravure  Portraits  and  2  other 
Illustrations.     8vo,  14s.  net. 

WILLIAM  GEORGE  WARD  AND  THE 
CATHOLIC  REVIVAL.  With  a  new  Preface. 
Portrait,  and  Facsimile.     8vo,  6s.  6d.  net. 

TEN  PERSONAL  STUDIES.  With  10  Portraits. 
8vo,  ioj.  6d.  net. 
Contents  :  Arthur  James  Balfour — Three  Notable  Editors  : 
Delane,  Hutton,  Knowles — Some  Characteristics  of  Henry 
Sidgwick — Robert,  Earl  of  Lytton— Father  Ignatius  Ryder  — 
Sir  M.  E.  Grant  Duff's  Diaries— Leo  XIII.—  The  Genius  of 
Cardinal  Wiseman  —  John  Henry  Newman  —  Newman  and 
Manning — Appendix. 

LONGMANS,   GREEN,    AND  CO. 

LONDON,    NEW   VORK,    BOMBAY,    AND   CALCUTTA 


MEN  AND  MATTERS 


BY 


WILFRID  WARD 


LONGMANS,    GREEN,    AND    CO. 

39  PATERNOSTER  ROW,   LONDON 

NEW  YORK,   BOMBAY,   AND   CALCUTTA 

1914 

All  rights  reserved 


^  ^  \A/5-V/yvv/ 


3  PREFACE 

|2  While  most  of  the  essays  in  this  volume  tell  their 
2  own  story,  a  few  words  must  be  said  in  respect  to 
|d  three  of  them,  entitled :  The  Conservative  Genius  of 
the  Church ;  St.  Thomas  Aquinas  and  Medieval 
Thought ;  and  Cardinal  Newman  on  Constructive 
Religious  Thought.  These  three  essays  deal  with 
different  aspects  of  one  subject. 

It  is  becoming  more  and  more  generally  admitted 

that  Christian  belief  cannot  be  adequately  justified  or 

preserved  for  an  inquiring  generation  without  taking 

account  of  the  legacy  left  us  by  the  special  wisdom 

and  insight  of  the  saints  and   the  prophets   of  old, 

which  reaches  its  climax  in  the  Revelation  of  Christ 

o     Himself.       And    it    is    widely    recognized    that    the 

22    corporate    society   which    has    ever    preserved    that 

10    legacy  in  its  traditions  is  the  Holy  Catholic  Church 

*s>    of    the    Creed.       Again,    in    the    difficult    task    of 

■*    Apologetic     and     of     interpreting     Christianity    to 

successive  civilizations,  it  is  now  generally  recognized 

that   the   thought    of  the  expert  few  is  the   natural 

guide  to  the  less  gifted  many.     And  here  again  the 

theological     tradition    of    a     corporate     society     is 

invaluable.      The    claim    for    Christianity    is    at    its 

strongest   as   exhibited,    not   in    the    reasoning   of   a 

single  average  mind,  but  in  the  life  and  thought  of 

the    Church  as  a  whole   and    from    the     beginning. 

The  individual   member  of  the    Church    participates 

|     in  thought  and  life  larger  and  deeper  than  his  own. 

§     The  crude    theory  of  "private  judgment"  finds  few 

§     advocates. 

|  a  i 

351271 


VI  PREFACE 

The  growing  acceptance  of  the  general  idea  of 
Church  authority,  as  opposed  to  a  mere  reliance  on 
private  judgment,  is  witnessed  to  by  the  spread  of  the 
Catholic  Movement  in  the  Church  of  England.  That 
authority  has  ever  been  definitely  conceived  and 
jealously  guarded  by  the  single  polity  of  the  Catholic 
and  Roman  Church,  which  claims  to  have  represented 
continuously  the  Holy  Catholic  Church  of  the  Creed. 

The  element  of  conservatism  in  the  Catholic 
Church  which  is  involved  in  its  very  idea  is 
emphasized  in  my  essay  on  the  Conservative  genius 
of  the  Church. 

But  concurrently  with  this  conservative  action  of 
the  Church,  Christianity  needs  for  its  defence  in  the 
present  as  in  the  past  active  thought,  undertaken 
with  the  object  of  adapting  the  details  of  Christian 
theology  to  the  exigencies  of  the  times.  Without  it 
conservatism  would  be  fossilism.  And  this  point  is 
enlarged  on  in  the  other  two  essays  to  which  I  have 
referred. 

It  has  a  very  important  practical  relation  to  the 
situation  which  has  been  created — in  the  Catholic  and 
Roman  Church  especially — by  the  rise  of  Modernism. 
There  has  actually  been,  in  the  course  of  the  past 
half  century  and  more,  a  widespread  endeavour  to 
bring  Catholic  thought  abreast  of  the  times — an 
endeavour  rendered  especially  urgent  in  our  own  day 
by  the  rapid  advance  of  the  sciences.  This  endeavour 
has  led  some  writers  into  disastrous  errors  and 
excesses.  But  there  are  also  signs  in  certain  quarters 
of  reaction  to  an  opposite  extreme — to  suspicion  of 
those  who  have  continued  to  attempt  the  same  difficult 
task  with  greater  caution  and  submission  to  authority. 
It    seems    to    be    assumed    in    some    quarters    that 


PREFACE  Vll 

submission  to  ecclesiastical  authority  must  suffice  for 
guidance  on  the  most  intricate  problems,  and  that  active 
thought  savours  of  a  wanton  and  dangerous  love  of 
innovation.  This  view  I  venture  strongly  to  deprecate, 
on  lines  laid  down  in  Cardinal  Newman's  writings,  as 
opposed  to  the  traditions  of  the  Church.  For  it  is  the 
great  theological  thinkers  who  have  been  our  intel- 
lectual guides  in  times  past — ecclesiastical  authority 
approving.  I  have  in  the  two  essays  to  which  I  have 
just  referred  endeavoured  to  point  out  two  things  : 

(i)  The  phenomenon  before  us  is  no  new  one. 
And  it  behoves  us  to  judge  the  present  in  the  light 
of  past  experience.  Again  and  again  the  attempt  to 
express  Christianity  in  terms  of  the  thought  of  the 
day  has  led  to  heresies,  and  heresies  are  of  course  a 
danger  to  the  Church.  But  it  is  the  very  same 
attempt  made  with  caution  and  submission  which  has 
gradually  formed  Catholic  theology — and  Catholic 
theology  is  the  great  intellectual  defence  of  the 
Church.  It  was  the  active  exercise  of  reason,  and 
not  the  fiat  of  authority,  which  wrought  out  the 
Summa  Contra  Gentiles  and  the  Summa  Tkeologus  to 
meet  the  very  special  intellectual  needs  of  the 
thirteenth  century. 

(2)  Alarmists  note,  in  views  put  forward  by  those 
who  are  endeavouring  to  make  the  much  needed 
intellectual  adaptations,  an  apparent  resemblance  to 
some  Modernist  writings,  and  appeal  to  this  resem- 
blance as  justifying  their  suspicions.  Yet,  again  judging 
by  the  past,  such  an  inference  is  surely  unwarrantable. 
The  fact  that  certain  positions  are  erroneous  does  not 
raise  even  a  presumption  that  others  apparently 
resembling  them  are  not  true  and  even  of  great 
importance.     The  Augustinus  of  Jansenius  contained 


Vlll  PREFACE 

heresy,  yet  its  author  held  that  he  was  only  repeating 
in  it  the  substance  of  what  St.  Augustine  had  said. 
In  this  contention  he  was  not  justified.  The 
differences  were  of  course  all -important.  But  the 
elements  of  apparent  resemblance  between  the  work 
of  the  Saint  and  that  of  the  founder  of  Jansenism  are 
undeniable.  The  Fathers  who  condemned  Nestorius 
at  Ephesus  were  orthodox  ;  yet  it  was  only  an 
exaggeration  of  their  teaching  which  was  responsible 
for  the  subsequent  heresy  of  the  Monophysites  which 
was  condemned  at  Chalcedon.  The  orthodox  position 
had  points  of  resemblance  to  each  of  the  opposite 
heresies.  Newman  has  pointed  out  that  the  members 
of  the  Church  of  Neocsesarea  suspected  St.  Basil  of 
a  tendency  to  Arianism,  the  more  so  because  some 
of  his  friends  were  semi-Arians.  But  he  traces  their 
suspicions  to  the  fact  that  they  themselves,  in  their 
zeal  against  Arianism,  had  approached  the  opposite 
extreme  of  the  Sabellians.  That  Arianism  is  false  does 
not  make  Sabellianism  true.  That  Jansenism  is  false 
does  not  make  Pelagianism  true.  That  Gallicanism  is 
false  did  not  prevent  the  great  Bishop  Dupanloup  from 
protesting  against  M.  Louis  Veuillot's  untheological 
exaggerations  of  the  Papal  prerogatives.  To  make 
such  a  protest  was  not  to  censure  the  enthusiastic 
loyalty  which  may  lead  to  such  exaggerations.  It  was 
a  zealous  but  undiscriminating  devotion  to  the  doctrine 
of  our  Lord's  divinity  which  led  some  to  the  extremes 
of  Monophysitism.  Thus  a  writer  may  be  doing  a 
most  necessary  work  in  defence  of  orthodoxy  in  vin- 
dicating a  thesis  which  the  alarmists  of  whom  I  have 
spoken  will  regard  as  akin  to  heresy. 

Furthermore,  even  men  who  have  written  what  is 
heretical  may,   like  Origen  or  Tertullian,  have  done 


PREFACE  IX 

valuable  work  for  Christian  thought.  We  can  no 
more  afford  now  than  we  could  in  the  fourth  century 
or  the  thirteenth  to  lose  contributions  of  value  in 
the  difficult  enterprise  of  meeting  the  anti-Christian 
thought  of  the  day. 

Efforts  at  a  synthesis  between  the  traditionary 
scholastic  teaching  and  the  developments  of  science 
and  thought  are  not  wanton  intellectual  indulgences, 
but  attempts  to  meet  an  urgent  need.  Such  an 
endeavour  has  been  made  systematically  for  some 
years  by  the  Institut  de  St.  Thomas,  at  Louvain, 
founded  under  Leo  XIII.'s  especial  patronage,  and 
the  further  spread  and  development  of  its  programme 
would  be  welcome  to  many  inquirers. 

Some  papers  read  before  the  Synthetic  Society 
are  published  in  this  volume  for  the  first  time.  Some 
account  of  that  society  is  given  in  the  essay  on 
Mr.  George  Wyndham. 

It  remains  for  me  to  thank  the  representatives  of 
Mr.  George  Wyndham  for  their  permission  to  use 
extracts  from  his  letters  in  my  essay  on  him  which 
first  appeared  in  the  Quarterly  Review,  and  to 
acknowledge  the  courtesy  of  the  editors  and  pro- 
prietors of  the  various  reviews  in  which  many  of  the 
essays  now  published  originally  appeared,  in  giving 
leave  for  their  republication. 

W.  W. 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I.     Disraeli i 

II.     Lord  Cromer  on  Disraeli 44 

III.  George  Wyndham 70 

IV.  Mr.  Chesterton  among  the  Prophets     ....  105 
V.     John  Stuart  Mill 145 

VI.     Cardinal  Vaughan 201 

VII.    Tennyson  at  Freshwater 251 

VIII.    Cardinal  Newman's  Sensitiveness 273 

IX.     Union  among  Christians 290 

X.    The  Conservative  Genius  of  the  Church  .    .    .  301 

XI.    St.  Thomas  Aquinas  and  Medieval  Thought       .  319 

XII.    Cardinal    Newman    on    Constructive   Religious 

Thought 347 

XIII.  Reduced  Christianity 392 

XIV.  Papers  read  before  the  Synthetic  Society     .    .  421 


MEN    AND    MATTERS 


DISRAELI 

When  the  generation  to  which  the  present  writer 
belongs  was  in  its  youth  there  was  a  little  book  of 
caricatures  of  Gladstone  and  Disraeli  which  was  very 
popular.  One  picture  depicted  the  House  of  Com- 
mons. On  one  side  of  the  table  stood  Mr.  Gladstone, 
fire  flashing  from  his  eyes,  as  with  angry  and  threat- 
ening gesticulation  he  denounced  his  chief  opponent. 
The  hawk-like  face  added  to  the  destructive  sugges- 
tion of  his  attitude,  while  the  movement  of  his  arm 
was  almost  physically  menacing.  At  the  other  side 
of  the  table,  impassive,  apparently  half  asleep,  with 
an  amused  sneer  on  the  face  and  his  hat  somewhat 
drawn  over  his  eyes,  sat  Mr.  Disraeli.  Beneath 
the  picture  was  written  an  extract  from  one  of  his 
speeches,  which  ran  nearly  as  follows  :  "  The  right 
honourable  gentleman  sometimes  addresses  us  in 
such  a  tone  and  with  such  a  manner  as  to  make  me 
sincerely  thankful  that  a  very  substantial  piece  of 
mahogany  stands  in  this  House  between  him  and 
myself." 

The  contrast  between  these  two  men  was  a  never- 
failing   drama   before   the   public   eye.     The  heated 

B 


2  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

earnestness  of  the  one,  the  cool  sarcasm  of  the  other ; 
the  unctuousness  of  the  one,  the  cynicism  of  the 
other ;  what  critics  regarded  as  an  undue  parade  of 
religious  principle  in  Gladstone,  and  the  entirely 
secular  ideals  of  his  rival — who,  nevertheless,  liked  a 
Cardinal,  and  avowed  himself  to  be  "  on  the  side  of 
the  angels," — this  contrast  was  unfailing  and  con- 
stantly found  fresh  occasions  for  its  display.  Glad- 
stone's attitude  towards  Disraeli  was  that  of  the 
righteous  man  towards  one  whom  he  holds  to  be 
without  principle  and  somewhat  flippant.  Disraeli 
treated  Gladstone  as  a  solemn  person  of  appalling 
energy,  with  perhaps  a  suspicion  of  Pecksniff  about 
him,  who  was  apt  to  get  very  excited ;  or,  as  he  once 
described  him,  as  a  "sophistical  rhetorician  inebriated 
by  the  exuberance  of  his  own  verbosity,  and  gifted 
with  an  egotistical  imagination."  The  two  antagonists 
used  to  recall  Pickwick  and  Jingle.  The  indignant 
righteousness  of  the  one  provoked  the  cynical  cool- 
ness of  the  other,  and  vice  versa.  I  am  surprised  that 
this  actual  comparison  never  occurred  to  the  clever 
cartoonist  in  Punch,  who  faithfully  reflected  the 
impressions  of  a  large  section  of  the  public,  and 
whose  pictures  of  the  two  men  had  much  which 
suggested  it. 

The  general  contrast,  when  once  it  had  been 
outlined,  could  not  fail  to  remain  fixed  in  the  public 
mind,  and  Punch  returned  to  it  again  and  again.  In 
one  cartoon  of  1873,  which  appeared  just  after  the 
formal  announcements  and  solemn  mutual  courtesies 
between  leaders  which  are  customary  at  the  opening 
of  a  session,  they  figured  as  "  Disralius "  and  "  Glad- 
stones"— two  Roman  augurs.  Dizzy  has  his  hand 
to   his  mouth  in  the  vain  endeavour  to  conceal  his 


DISRAELI  3 

laughter.  "  I  always  wonder,  brother,"  he  says, 
"  how  we  chief  augurs  can  meet  on  the  opening  day 
without  laughing."  Gladstonius  replies  with  severity, 
"  I  have  never  felt  any  temptation  to  the  hilarity  you 
suggest,  brother,  and  the  remark  savours  of  flippancy." 
In  another  cartoon  Gladstone  is  reading  Dizzy's 
Lotkair,  just  after  its  publication.  And  Dizzy  has 
taken  down  from  his  bookshelf  a  copy  of  Gladstone's 
Juventus  Mundi.  Gladstone's  frown  is  severe  as  he 
ejaculates*  "Hm — flippant!"  while  Dizzy's  "Ha — 
prosy ! "  is  accompanied  by  a  yawn  of  extreme  bore- 
dom. After  Gladstone's  extraordinary  display  of 
energy  in  his  Scotch  campaign,  when  he  returned  to 
political  life  in  the  late  'seventies,  Punch  published  a 
cartoon  in  which  he  was  represented  as  a  fancy  skater 
performing  the  most  wonderful  and  exhausting  evolu- 
tions on  the  ice.  Dizzy,  looking  on  from  the  bank  of 
the  pond,  has  an  expression  of  wonder  blended  with 
anxiety,  and  has  just  taken  down  his  eye-glass  after 
scrutinizing  the  performance.  "  Wonderful ! "  he 
exclaims.  "  Both  wind  and  limb !  At  our  time  of 
life,  too,  when  a  fall  would  be  so  serious ! " 

Throughout  the  cartoons  of  Disraeli  in  the  late 
'sixties  and  early  'seventies  the  old  tradition  was  still 
visible,  that  he  was  a  clever  adventurer — extraordi- 
narily clever  indeed,  but  not  to  be  regarded  as  a 
serious  politician.  His  success  in  carrying  the 
Reform  Bill  in  1868  was  represented  as  a  wonderful 
egg  dance  achieved  by  an  acrobat,  and  he  appeared 
again  and  again  as  a  juggler,  a  harlequin,  a  tumbler,  a 
conjurer  or  a  rope-walker  or  an  actor,  and  once  as 
Fagin  the  Jew  coaching  his  young  pickpockets. 

In  the  early  'seventies  Disraeli  had  begun  to 
strike  the  Imperial  note.     It  took  some  years  before 


4  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

this  was  generally  felt  to  represent,  as  it  certainly 
did,  a  really  deep  and  almost  passionate  belief.  At 
first  it  appeared  to  be  a  fresh  instance  of  the  contrast 
between  his  attitude  on  foreign  politics  and  Glad- 
stone's phase  of  Little  Englandism  without  at  once 
suggesting  a  new  access  in  Disraeli  of  political  serious- 
ness and  conviction — a  quality  of  which,  in  his  own 
way,  Mr.  Gladstone  had  so  large  a  share.  Disraeli's 
Imperialism  was  at  first  believed  to  be  a  clever  move 
in  the  game — a  new  limelight  for  the  stage  effects  and 
dramatic  surprises  he  loved,  as  when  he  suddenly 
bought  up  the  Suez  Canal,  and  thus  secured  the  key 
to  India.  And  this  idea  only  gradually  gave  way  to 
a  truer  one.  Even  when  Disraeli  suggested  the  title 
"Empress  of  India"  for  Queen  Victoria,  Tenniel's 
witty  pictures  in  Punch — "  New  crowns  for  Old," 
after  the  "New  lamps  for  Old  "  of  Aladdin's  story, 
and  the  crowning  of  Dizzy  by  Victoria, — represented 
an  impression  which  had  but  recently  ceased  to  be 
widespread.  Queen  Victoria  was  to  be  flattered 
and  kept  in  a  good  humour  by  a  new  title  which 
cost  Disraeli  nothing  and  added  nothing  whatever 
to  her  real  power ;  and  Disraeli  was  to  receive 
in  return  the  coronet  of  an  Earl  to  satisfy  his 
ambition. 

But  in  point  of  fact,  in  spite  of  the  somewhat 
theatrical  element  which,  in  his  Imperialism  as  in  all 
else,  was  visible  in  Disraeli's  operations,  there  is  little 
doubt  that  he  developed  in  his  old  age,  when  the 
stimulus  of  personal  ambition  was  inevitably  less  keen 
— for  ambition  had  been  satisfied  and  his  own  future 
was  limited  by  the  laws  of  life  to  a  few  years — a 
really  earnest  passion  for  the  development  of  the 
Imperial  idea.     The  Primrose  League,  founded  in  his 


DISRAELI  5 

honour — with  its  knights  and  dames  and  its  coloured 
badges — has  truly  caught  this  spirit,  and  is  a  lasting 
monument  to  it.  The  machinery  is  showy  and 
theatrical.  But  it  represents  enthusiasm  and  hard 
practical  work  in  educating  the  party.  The  Jingo 
songs  which  accompanied  its  birth  had  a  touch  of  the 
cheapness  and  the  want  of  true  dignity  which  were 
apt  to  attend  all  his  own  work.  But  they  helped  on 
the  cause  and  appealed  to  minds  which  were  worth 
winning.  Disraeli  was  thoroughly  in  earnest  in  this 
last  phase  of  his  career,  and  his  imagination  was 
really  fired.  It  was  this  development  in  him  which 
quite  transformed  the  attitude  of  the  late  Lord  Salis- 
bury towards  his  chief,  and  he  did  not  stand  alone. 
While  some  few  felt  to  the  end  towards  Disraeli  as 
towards  a  successful  adventurer  without  convictions — 
the  Acrobat,  the  Gamester,  the  Leotard  of  Punch's 
pages — they  were  but  a  small  and  negligible  minority 
in  the  party.  The  late  Lord  Emly,  who  as  Mr. 
Monsell  had  been  a  devoted  Peelite  in  1 846,  and  had 
followed  Disraeli's  career  with  very  keen,  though 
unsympathetic,  interest,  once  said  to  the  present 
writer :  "  People  often  talk  of  Disraeli's  rise  from 
nothing  to  being  Prime  Minister  in  1867  as  a  marvel- 
lous achievement.  In  my  opinion,  however,  the 
change  of  his  position  between  1867  and  1878 — the 
high-water  mark  of  his  second  innings — was  far  more 
remarkable.  In  1867,  while  there  were  a  few  enthu- 
siastic devotees  of  his  genius,  the  almost  universal 
feeling,  even  in  his  own  party,  was  that  he  was  an 
unprincipled  adventurer,  yet  so  marvellously  clever 
that  in  a  difficult  time  it  was  best  for  the  party  to  use 
him  and  to  follow  him.  He  was  still  an  outsider ; 
and  the  great  aristocracy  of  England  regarded  it  as 


6  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

impossible  that  he  should  ever  be  accepted  as  their 
social  equal.  In  1878  the  impossible  had  happened. 
He  had  won  not  only  power,  but  general  reverence. 
Our  aristocracy  not  only  accepted  him,  but  treated 
him  with  the  utmost  respect.  I  have  seen  the  Duke 
of  Richmond  in  his  company,  and  the  Duke's  attitude 
was  one  of  deference,  and  even  of  fear." 

The  publication  of  Mr.  Monypenny's  classical 
Biography  has  placed  those  who  in  their  youth 
witnessed  with  fascination  the  last  two  acts  of  a  great 
drama  in  a  position  to  understand  nearly  the  whole. 
It  was  feared  by  some  that  when  he  came  to  deal  with 
Disraeli's  Parliamentary  life  his  own  want  of  personal 
familiarity  with  the  miliett  in  which  it  was  passed 
would  make  Mr.  Monypenny  fail.  No  one,  I  think, 
who  has  read  his  fascinating  volumes  can  doubt  of  his 
remarkable  success.  Indeed,  much  as  we  may  admire 
Lord  Morley's  Life  of  Gladstone^  it  is  more  than  any- 
thing in  the  vivid  dramatic  quality  that  its  author  fails, 
while  Mr.  Monypenny  succeeds.  Few  things  have 
ever  been  written  in  political  biography  more  dramatic 
than  Mr.  Monypenny's  account  of  the  long-standing 
duel  between  Disraeli  and  Peel,  which  first  made 
Disraeli  actually  "arrive  "  in  political  life.  It  is  pro- 
bable that  the  very  lack  of  experience  which  made 
some  onlookers  anxious  proved  Mr.  Monypenny's 
best  friend ;  while  Lord  Morley's  political  experience 
made  him  somewhat  careless  in  this  respect.  The 
fact  that  Mr.  Monypenny  neither  remembered  those 
days  nor  was  familiar  with  the  life  of  the  House 
of  Commons  made  him  take  infinite  pains  to 
collect  all  the  contemporary  sources  of  information 
which  could  make  these  scenes  live  for  himself,  and, 
in  doing  so,  he  has  made  them  live  for  others.     For 


DISRAELI  7 

Lord  Morley,  on  the  contrary,  both  the  place  and,  to 
some  extent,  the  events  he  describes  were  matters  with 
which  he  was  personally  familiar ;  and  he  sometimes 
seems  to  assume  the  same  familiarity  as  already 
secured  on  the  part  of  his  readers.  He  has,  there- 
fore, not  left  for  posterity  anything  approaching  the 
vivid  picture  of  the  drama  of  House  of  Commons 
debates  which  Mr.  Monypenny  has  painted.  Mr. 
Monypenny's  success  makes  it  all  the  more  tragic 
that  he  lived  only  long  enough  to  hear  the  first 
notes  of  the  general  acclaim  accorded  to  his  work. 

Disraeli's  success  was  due  before  all  things  to  an 
avowed  and  unconquerable  ambition.  He  was  stimu- 
lated rather  than  cowed  by  the  consciousness  that  he 
had  to  fight  against  great  odds  in  his  own  antecedents 
and  in  popular  prejudice.  He  openly  avowed  in  a 
speech  of  1844  that  personal  ambition  was  his  ruling 
motive.  "  There  is  no  doubt,  gentlemen,"  he  said, 
"that  all  men  who  offer  themselves  as  candidates  for 
public  favour  have  motives  of  some  sort.  I  candidly 
acknowledge  that  I  have,  and  I  will  tell  you  what  they 
are.  I  love  fame  ;  I  love  reputation  ;  I  love  to  live 
in  the  eyes  of  the  country,  and  it  is  a  glorious  thing 
for  a  man  to  do  who  has  had  my  difficulties  to  contend 
against."  "A  member  who  wants  to  get  on,"  he 
was  wont  to  say,  "should  be  constantly  in  his  place  in 
the  House.  And  when  he  is  not  there  he  should  be 
reading  Hansard."  And  he  practised  what  he  preached. 
It  was  his  unflagging  pertinacity  ;  his  freedom  from 
the  drawback  of  sensitiveness ;  the  determination 
that  he  would  succeed — the  insistence  that  he  had 
succeeded  ;  the  refusal  to  look  in  the  face  the  bare 
possibility  of  failure,  that  in  the  event  made  his  genius 
triumphant. 


8  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

Gladstone  knew  the  temper  of  that  fastidious 
assembly,  the  House  of  Commons,  well  before  he 
entered  it,  for  it  was  reflected  closely  enough  in  the 
Oxford  Union  of  his  time.  Disraeli,  on  the  contrary, 
frequently  and  seriously  misjudged  it.  The  story  of 
his  first  speech  has  often  been  told.  The  late  Sir 
Rupert  Kettle,  an  eye  witness,  left  in  his  diary  an 
account  of  it  which  Mr.  Monypenny  never  saw,  and 
which  helps  to  complete  the  picture  he  gives.  Sir 
Rupert  sketched  Disraeli  as  he  spoke,  and  under 
the  sketch  is  written :  "  Disraeli,  a  little  dandy  Jew, 
looks  about  18."  His  hair  was  long;  he  was  much 
scented  ;  he  was  over-dressed.  The  imagery  con- 
genial to  his  Oriental  mind  made  his  style  turgid,  a 
quality  most  repugnant  to  the  taste  of  the  House. 
His  self-confidence  was  too  transparent  to  be  disguised. 
He  could  not,  therefore,  attain  to  the  touch  of  diffi- 
dence which  the  House  requires  in  a  new  aspirant  for 
its  favour.  And  he  was  a  Jew  in  days  when  that  very 
fact  greatly  added  to  the  prejudice  against  him.  The 
words  in  Sir  Rupert's  diary  are  hasty  and  inadequate 
as  a  description,  but  they  have  the  touch  of  life  that 
belongs  to  contemporary  notes. 

The  next  thing  was  young  D'Israeli's  maiden  speech. 
He  began  with  all  the  confidence  of  a  bully  to  claim 
indulgence  for  his  first  attempt.  Then  said  a  few  words  to 
O'Connell  about  his  rambling  speech.  "  But  I'll  spare  the 
honourable  and  learned  gent's  feelings."  (Laughter.)  From 
this  time  he  tried  to  do  the  orator  so  very  much  that  roars  of 
laughter  ended  a  sentence  begun  amidst  coughs  and  groans. 
Even  his  own  Party  did  not  cheer  after  a  sentence  or  two. 
[We  caught  such  sentences  as]  "When  the  bell  of  our 
Cathedral  announced  the  death  of  a  monarch,"  "  See  the 
philosophic  prejudice  of  man,"  "  Nothing  is  so  easy  as  to 
laugh,"  "  Oh,   give  me  but  five  minutes  by  the  clock,"  "  I 


DISRAELI  9 

never  attempted  anything  but  I  succeeded,"  and  lastly  he 
hooted,  to  be  heard  above  the  noise :  "  Though  you  won't 
hear  me  now,  the  time  will  come  when  I  will  make  you  hear 
me."     So  much  for  him.1 

In  Mr.  Mony penny's  pages  we  get  one  or  two 
further  details  which  show  the  kind  of  bombastic 
imagery  which  the  speech  contained.  One  of  the 
sentences  which  was  laughed  down  alluded  to  some 
one  as  having  "  in  the  one  hand  the  Keys  of  St.  Peter, 
and  in  the  other  the  Cap  of  Liberty."  Disraeli 
complained  in  conversation  that  his  enemies  would 
not  allow  him  to  finish  his  pictures — and  the  "  cap  of 
liberty"  never  got  into  the  speech  at  all,  as  the 
speaker's  sentence  was  broken  short  by  the  general 
laughter.  However,  far  from  being  discouraged,  he 
appears  hardly  to  have  been  even  ruffled.  He  only 
awaited  another  opportunity  and  took  note  of  rocks 
ahead  which  must  be  avoided.  Ten  days  later  he 
was  on  his  feet  again.  He  was  careful  this  time  to 
indulge  in  no  imagery.  The  speech  was  clear  and 
unpretentious  and  succeeded.  He  soon  won  the  ear 
of  the  House  to  some  extent,  but  it  was  long  before 
he  was  certain  of  it.  His  own  account  of  the  dogged 
persistency  with  which  he  pursued  a  speech  in  March, 
1842,  on  the  Consular  Service  is  a  good  exhibition  of 
his  persevering  determination. 

The  affair  last  night  realized  all  my  hopes ;  the  success 
was  complete  and  brilliant.  I  rose  at  five  o'clock  to  one  of 
the  most  disagreeable  audiences  that  ever  welcomed  a 
speaker.  Everybody  seemed  to  affect  not  to  be  aware  of  my 
existence,  and  there  was  a  general  buzz  and  chatter. 
Nevertheless,  not  losing  my  head,  I  proceeded  without 
hesitation  for  ten  minutes,  though  when  I  recollected  what  I 

1  This  extract  was  published  in  The  Times  of  Nov.  29,  1912. 


io  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

had  to  travel  through,  and  the  vast  variety  of  detail  which  I 
had  perspicuously  to  place  before  the  House,  I  more  than 
once,  despaired  of  accomplishing  my  purpose. 

In  about  ten  minutes  affairs  began  to  mend  ;  when  a 
quarter  of  an  hour  had  elapsed  there  was  generally  an  atten- 
tive audience  ;  and  from  that  time  until  near  half-past  seven, 
when  I  sat  down,  having  been  up  about  two  hours  and  twenty 
minutes,  I  can  say  without  the  slighest  exaggeration  that 
not  only  you  might  have  heard  a  pin  fall  in  the  House,  but 
there  was  not  an  individual,  without  a  single  exception,  who 
did  not  listen  to  every  sentence  with  the  most  marked 
interest,  and  even  excitement.  The  moment  I  finished,  Peel, 
giving  me  a  cheer,  got  up  and  went  to  dinner. 

After  the  speech  Sydney  Herbert,  as  he  records, 
came  up  to  him  and  asked  where  he  got  his  mass 
of  extraordinary  information.  "A  most  remarkable 
display,"  Herbert  added,  "and  it  is  thought  so." 

Every  move  in  the  game,  every  sign  of  success  and 
criticism  is  recorded  in  the  letters  to  his  sister.  In 
1842  he  realizes  that  his  position  is  on  a  new  footing. 
"  I  already  find  myself  without  effort  the  leader  of  a 
party,  chiefly  youths  and  new  members."  The  refer- 
ence is  to  the  Young  England  party  whose  most 
prominent  members  were  the  late  Duke  of  Rutland, 
then  Lord  John  Manners,  George  Smythe,  and  Baillie 
Cochrane.  This  was  a  passing  phase  ;  but  not  with- 
out its  importance.  With  Disraeli's  peculiar  tempera- 
ment, any  form  of  leadership  fired  his  imagination 
and  helped  to  further  success. 

I  think  that  Mr.  Monypenny  makes  good  his 
contention  that  those  have  wronged  the'  man  who 
ascribed  Disraeli's  virulent  attacks  on  his  old  chief 
three  years  later  simply  to  the  fact  of  Peel's  not  giving 
him  office  when  he  came  to  power  in  1841.  But  they 
cannot  be  ascribed  primarily  to  Disraeli's  convictions 


DISRAELI  ii 

on  the  proposed  repeal  of  the  Corn  Laws.  The  first 
attack  had  nothing  to  do  with  this  question.  But  it 
was  such  a  brilliant  success  in  the  House  that  Disraeli 
saw  his  path  marked  out  for  him.  His  primary 
motive  was  neither  the  indulgence  of  personal  resent- 
ment against  Peel  nor  zeal  for  the  retention  of  the 
Corn  Laws.  It  was  simply  that  his  own  gifts  and  the 
circumstances  of  the  time  made  his  line  of  action 
the  best  road  to  the  front.  The  country  gentlemen 
wanted  a  man  of  parts  to  plead  their  cause  and  oppose 
Peel.  The  effectiveness  of  his  first  attack  on  Peel 
marked  out  the  method  to  be  chosen — the  strong 
personal  element  in  the  opposition.  There  was  spice 
and  piquancy  in  such  personal  encounters,  and  they 
brought  into  evidence  his  most  brilliant  gifts.  They 
brought  also  immediate  notoriety :  and  for  a  man  of 
genius  notoriety  soon  comes  to  mean  success,  which 
was  Disraeli's  goal. 

This  most  important  phase  of  Disraeli's  career  is 
described  at  length  and  with  masterly  power  by  Mr. 
Monypenny.  Its  general  character  has  been  stereo- 
typed in  the  cartoons  in  Punch,  in  one  of  which 
Disraeli's  incisive  criticisms  are  represented  by  Dizzy 
with  his  teeth  dug  into  Peel's  body  hanging  on  to  him 
with  doglike  tenacity.  Mr.  Monypenny  has  seen  his 
opportunity  in  this  historic  and  prolonged  encounter, 
and  has  taken  it.  The  first  assault  was  in  1845,  tne 
occasion  being  a  protest  which  had  been  made  against 
the  opening  by  Government  officials  of  certain  letters 
addressed  to  Mazzini,  who  was  living  in  England. 
Peel  had  defended  the  Government's  action  success- 
fully and  with  great  warmth  as  absolutely  necessary 
with  a  view  to  preventing  serious  international  compli- 
cations.    Disraeli,  posing  as  a  friendly  critic,  ridiculed 


12  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

nevertheless  the  meticulous  detail  in  Peel's  account  of 
the  succession  of  causes  and  effects  which,  had  the 
letters  not  been  opened,  must  have  led  inevitably 
at  last  to  the  most  disastrous  consequences.  He 
compared  it  to  the  nursery  story  of  the  house  that 
Jack  built  in  which  "  this  is  the  dog  that  worried  the 
cat  that  killed  the  rat  that  ate  the  malt  that  lay  in  the 
house  that  Jack  built."  But  he  ended  with  some 
sarcastic  banter  directed  against  the  note  of  indignant 
and  even  angry  righteousness  which  marked  Peel's 
speech. 

The  right  hon.  gentleman  will  pardon  me  for  observing  it, 
but  he  displayed  an  unusual  warmth.  I  am  aware  that  it  by 
no  means  follows  that  the  right  hon.  gentleman  felt  it.  The 
right  hon.  baronet  has  too  great  a  mind,  and  fills  too  eminent 
a  position,  ever  to  lose  his  temper  ;  but  in  a  popular  assembly 
it  is  sometimes  expedient  to  enact  the  part  of  the  choleric 
gentleman.  The  right  hon.  gentleman  touched  the  red  box 
with  emotion.  I  know  from  old  experience  that  when  one 
first  enters  the  House  these  exhibitions  are  rather  alarming, 
and  I  believe  that  some  of  the  younger  members  were  much 
frightened  ;  but  I  advised  them  not  to  be  terrified.  I  told 
them  that  the  right  hon.  baronet  would  not  eat  them  up,  would 
not  even  resign  ;  the  very  worst  thing  he  would  do  would  be 
to  tell  them  to  rescind  a  vote.  (Loud  cheering  and  shouts  of 
laughter.) 

There  was  no  mistaking  the  acerbity  that  underlay 
Disraeli's  speech,  although  he  professed  to  speak  as  a 
friend  of  the  Government.  For  the  moment  Peel's 
retort  was  extremely  effective,  as  it  was  dignified. 

It  is  certainly  very  possible  to  manifest  great  vehemence 
of  action  and  yet  not  to  be  in  a  great  passion.  On  the  other 
hand,  it  is  possible  to  be  exceedingly  cold,  indifferent  and 


DISRAELI  13 

composed  in  your  manner,  and  yet  to  cherish  very  acrimonious 
feelings.  Notwithstanding  the  provocations  of  the  hon. 
gentleman,  I  will  not  deal  so  harshly  with  him  as  he  has  dealt 
with  me.  He  undertakes  to  assure  the  House  that  my 
vehemence  was  all  pretended,  and  warmth  all  simulated.  I, 
on  the  contrary,  will  do  him  entire  justice.  I  do  believe  that 
his  bitterness  was  not  simulated,  but  that  it  was  entirely 
sincere.  The  hon.  gentleman  has  a  perfect  right  to  support  a 
hostile  motion  .  .  .  but  let  him  not  say  that  he  does  it  in  a 
friendly  spirit. 

Had  Peel  stopped  there  he  would  probably  have 
scored  decisively  against  Disraeli.  But,  led  on  by  his 
good  memory  and  his  habit  of  quotation,  he  cited  in 
conclusion  Canning's  famous  denunciation  of  the 
candid  friend : 

Give  me  the  avowed,  the  erect,  the  manly  foe  : 
Bold  I  can  meet,  perhaps  may  turn,  the  blow ; 
But  of  all  plagues,  good  Heaven,  Thy  wrath  can  send, 
Save,  save,  O  save  me,  from  the  candid  friend ! 

This  gave  Disraeli  a  great  chance,  for  Peel's 
behaviour  to  Canning  in  the  'twenties  was  the  passage 
in  his  career  which  his  enemies  best  remembered  in 
his  disfavour.  Disraeli  had  to  bide  his  time,  for  he 
had  already  spoken  and  could  not  again  speak  in 
reply.  But  he  got  a  friend  to  bring  the  subject  up 
again  a  week  later,  and  began  his  attack  on  Peel 
in  good  earnest.  His  speech  was  a  criticism  on 
Peel's  whole  policy.  From  beginning  to  end  it  was 
full  of  brilliant  passages.  Peel's  reference  to  Canning 
supplied  the  poisoned  shaft  which  was  discharged  at 
the  end. 

The  right  hon.  gentleman  knows  what  the  introduction  of 
a  great  name  does  in  debate — how  important  is  its  effect,  and 


14  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

occasionally  how  electrical.  He  never  refers  to  any  author 
who  is  not  great,  and  sometimes  who  is  not  loved — Canning, 
for  example.  That  is  a  name  never  to  be  mentioned,  I  am 
sure,  in  the  House  of  Commons  without  emotion.  We  all 
admire  his  genius.  We  all — at  least,  most  of  us — deplore  his 
untimely  end ;  and  we  all  sympathize  with  him  in  his  fierce 
struggle  with  supreme  prejudice  and  sublime  mediocrity — 
with  inveterate  foes  and  with  candid  friends.  (Loud  cheer- 
ing.) The  right  hon.  gentleman  may  be  sure  that  a  quotation 
from  such  an  authority  will  always  tell.  Some  lines,  for 
example,  upon  friendship,  written  by  Mr.  Canning  and  quoted 
by  the  right  hon.  gentleman !  The  theme,  the  poet,  the 
speaker — what  a  felicitous  combination !  (Loud  and  long- 
continued  cheers.)  Its  effect  in  debate  must  be  overwhelming  ; 
and  I  am  sure,  if  it  were  addressed  to  me,  all  that  would 
remain  would  be  for  me  thus  publicly  to  congratulate  the 
right  hon.  gentleman,  not  only  on  his  ready  memory,  but  on 
his  courageous  conscience. 

Mr.  Monypenny  makes  the  scene  more  vivid  by 
quoting  a  description  in  Erasers  Magazine  of  Disraeli's 
parliamentary  manner. 

With  his  supercilious  expression  of  countenance,  slightly 
dashed  with  pomposity,  and  a  dilettante  affectation,  he  stands 
with  his  hands  on  his  hips,  or  his  thumbs  in  the  armholes  of 
his  waistcoat,  while  there  is  a  slight,  very  slight,  gyratory 
movement  of  the  upper  part  of  his  body,  such  as  you  will  see 
ballroom  exquisites  adopt  when  they  condescend  to  prattle  a 
flirtation.  And  then,  with  voice  low-toned  and  slightly  drawl- 
ing, without  emphasis,  except  when  he  strings  himself  up  for 
points,  his  words  are  not  so  much  delivered  as  that  they  flow 
from  the  mouth,  as  if  it  were  really  too  much  trouble  for  so 
clever,  so  intellectual — in  a  word,  so  literary  a  man  to  speak 
at  all.  .  .  . 

So  much  for  his  ordinary  level  speaking.  When  he  makes 
his  points  the  case  is  totally  different.  Then  his  manner 
changes.     He  becomes  more  animated,  though  still   less   so 


DISRAELI  15 

than  any  other  speaker  of  equal  power  over  the  House.  You 
can  then  detect  the  nicest  and  most  delicate  inflexions  in  the 
tones  of  his  voice  ;  and  they  are  managed,  with  exquisite  art, 
to  give  effect  to  the  irony  or  sarcasm  of  the  moment.  ...  In 
conveying  an  innuendo,  an  ironical  sneer,  or  a  suggestion  of 
contempt,  which  courtesy  forbids  him  to  translate  into  words 
— in  conveying  such  masked  enmities  by  means  of  a  glance, 
a  shrug,  an  altered  tone  of  voice,  or  a  transient  expression  of 
face,  he  is  unrivalled.  Not  only  is  the  shaft  envenomed,  but 
it  is  aimed  with  deadly  precision  by  a  cool  hand  and  a  keen 
eye,  with  a  courage  fearless  of  retaliation.  He  will  convulse 
the  House  by  the  action  that  helps  his  words,  yet  leave  nothing 
for  his  victims  to  take  hold  of.  He  is  a  most  dangerous 
antagonist  in  this  respect,  because  so  intangible.  And  all  the 
while  you  are  startled  by  his  extreme  coolness  and  impassi- 
bility. .  .  .  You  might  suppose  him  wholly  unconscious  of  the 
effect  he  is  producing  ;  for  he  never  seems  to  laugh  or  to 
chuckle,  however  slightly,  at  his  own  hits.  While  all  around 
him  are  convulsed  with  merriment  or  excitement  at  some  of 
his  finely-wrought  sarcasms,  he  holds  himself,  seemingly,  in 
total  suspension,  as  though  he  had  no  existence  (sic)  for  the 
ordinary  feelings  and  passions  of  humanity  ;  and  the  moment 
the  shouts  and  confusion  have  subsided,  the  same  calm,  low, 
monotonous,  but  yet  distinct  and  searching  voice  is  heard  still 
pouring  forth  his  ideas,  while  he  is  preparing  to  launch  another 
sarcasm,  hissing  hot,  into  the  soul  of  his  victim. 

Then  comes  Mr.  Monypenny's  own  vivid  sketch 
of  the  scene  and  its  brilliant  consequences. 

With  the  aid  of  this  writer  we  can  almost  see  Disraeli 
standing  with  pale  face  and  impassive  manner  as  he  delivers 
his  philippic  ;  hear  the  tone  of  every  sentence  as  it  falls  from 
his  lips  ;  and  follow  the  emotions  of  his  audience  as  it  listens, 
now  perplexed,  now  expectant,  now  hilarious.  We  have  first 
the  low,  level  speaking  in  no  way  remarkable  that  makes  the 
preparation  ;  the  gradual  development  of  the  theme  of  Peel's 
disregard  of  party  .  .  .  the  feigned  humility  of  his  readiness 


1 6  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

to  bow  to  the  rod,  and  the  seeming  compliment  to  Peel's 
mastery  of  quotation  ;  Peel  nervous  and  expectant,  the  House 
still  puzzled  ;  the  stealthy  approach  to  the  position  from 
which  the  spring  is  to  be  made  ;  the  name  which  is  the  key- 
word, dropped  as  if  by  accident — "  Canning,  for  example  "  ; 
Peel  visibly  uncomfortable ;  the  House  beginning  to  be 
excited  ;  the  drawling  allusion  to  Canning's  fierce  struggle 
with  "  sublime  mediocrity  " — perhaps  aimed  at  Peel,  though 
all  are  still  doubtful — and  "  with — candid  friends  " — when  the 
pause,  the  inflexion  of  the  speaker's  voice,  and  the  direction 
of  his  glance  convert  doubt  into  certainty  ;  and  then  the 
culminating  blow,  "  Some  lines  upon  friendship  written  by  Mr. 
Canning,  and  quoted  by  the  right  honourable  gentleman  "  ! 
and,  where  a  lesser  artist  would  have  spoilt  all  by  some 
crudity  of  comment,  only  the  restrained  but  mordant  words : 
"The  theme,  the  poet,  the  speaker — what  a  felicitous  com- 
bination ! " 

The  effect  of  the  speech  on  the  House  [Mr.  Mony penny 
continues]  was  stupendous.  "  It  would  have  made  you  cry 
with  delight,"  wrote  George  Smythe  to  Mrs.  Disraeli,  "  to 
have  heard  the  thunders  of  cheering  "  ;  and  the  excitement  at 
the  close  was  so  great  that  it  was  some  time  before  Graham, 
who  rose  to  follow,  could  make  himself  heard. 

Here  for  a  moment  I  pause.  Before  taking  a 
further  view  of  Disraeli  when  he  became  a  real  power 
in  the  country,  as  he  did  in  the  contest  between  the 
Peelites  and  the  old  Tories,  and  continued  to  be 
thenceforth,  it  is  necessary  to  go  beneath  the  surface 
of  events  and  study  the  temperament  and  character 
revealed  in  these  pages.  We  must  say  something  of 
Disraeli's  moral  character,  of  the  ideals  which  actuated 
him  over  and  above  the  one  governing  ambition  for 
personal  success.  We  must  look  at  the  strong  and 
weak  elements  of  taste  and  temperament  and  equip- 
ment which  may  be  traced  to  his  Oriental  blood  and 
the  conditions  of  his  early  life.     In  a  word,  a  brief 


DISRAELI  17 

psychological  study  of  the  man  must  precede  a  further 
study  of  his  career. 

The  question  has  been  often  asked,  Was  Disraeli 
sincere  ?  and  it  is  not  so  easy  to  answer  as  it  might  seem 
to  be  at  first  sight.  It  is  like  asking  if  an  imaginative 
child  of  four  believes  in  fairies.  To  answer  "  yes  "  may 
be  untrue  ;  to  answer  "no"  equally  untrue.  In  both 
cases  there  is  a  mid-way  state  of  mind.  Disraeli  had 
certain  most  genuine  enthusiasms,  and  up  to  a  certain 
point  sincere  beliefs.  Yet,  his  underlying  cynicism 
prevented  their  being  as  absolute  or  sacred  for  him  as 
political  convictions  would  be  for  many  another.  The 
question,  Is  any  of  it  more  than  a  game  which  must 
be  played  successfully  ?  was  ever  lurking  in  the  depths 
of  his  consciousness  as  he  discussed  legislative  schemes; 
and  this  probably  helped  in  concentrating  him  on  his 
own  personal  career.  Whatever  was  or  was  not 
worth  while  in  relation  to  the  future  of  the  world,  to 
play  the  game  successfully  was  worth  while  for  him- 
self ;  and,  moreover,  if  anything  was  great  and  worth 
achieving  by  him  in  relation  to  the  good  of  the  country 
or  of  the  race,  it  could  only  be  effected  by  his  own 
success  in  making  his  powers  appreciated.  Only  thus 
could  his  schemes  become  operative.  Therefore  I 
think  that  there  is  a  greater  unity  than  Mr.  Mony- 
penny  sees  between  the  words  I  have  already  cited,  in 
which  Disraeli  avows  so  frankly  his  personal  ambition 
in  the  speech  of  1844,  and  the  apparently  higher  tone 
taken  up  in  the  passage  his  biographer  quotes  from 
Coningsby.  In  Conwgsby,  when  alluding  to  "that 
noble  ambition  which  will  not  let  a  man  be  content 
until  his  intellectual  power  is  recognized  by  his  race," 
he  associates  it  with  the  view  of  life  taken  by  a  hero 
— with   "the   heroic   feeling  .   .    .  that   in   old   days 


1 8  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

produced  demigods  ;  without  which  no  State  is  safe  ; 
without  which  political  institutions  are  meat  without 
salt ;  the  Crown  a  bauble,  the  Church  an  establish- 
ment, Parliaments  debating  clubs,  and  civilization 
itself  a  fitful  and  transient  dream."  It  was  only  by- 
making  himself  felt  and  appreciated  that  he  could 
accomplish  the  hero's  aims, — those  actions  that  will  live 
in  history  as  great  and  beneficent. 

His  mixture  of  sincerity  and  cynicism  is  visible,  I 
think,  in  a  very  different  field  from  that  of  politics — 
namely,  in  his  correspondence  with  the  lady  who  after- 
wards became  his  wife,  in  which  he  assures  her  that 
while  he  first  thought  of  marrying  her  from  interested 
motives,  he  has  come  to  love  her  for  herself  alone. 
The  letter  is  not,  I  think,  substantially  insincere  ;  but 
the  strong  expressions  calculated  to  touch  a  woman's 
heart  have  in  them  something  histrionic,  which  was 
part  of  his  cynicism.  Such  expressions  were  hardly 
the  outpourings  of  a  full  heart.  He  knew  them  to  be 
very  pleasing  to  a  woman  :  and  his  feelings  as  well  as 
his  interest  prompted  him  to  please  this  particular 
woman.  "  He  is  to  be  depended  on  to  a  certain 
degree,"  is  what  his  wife  writes  of  him  after  some 
years  of  experience,  and  that  is  probably  about  the  truth. 
People  have  often  debated  as  to  whether  Disraeli  was 
sincere  or  insincere,  and  have  taken  sides  strongly 
for  one  or  the  other  position.  He  was  not  insincere  ; 
he  was,  to  some  extent,  sincere  in  most  of  his  enter- 
prises. He  was  absolutely  sincere  in  his  desire  for 
his  own  advancement,  and  other  sincere  aspirations 
became  more  prominent  after  he  had  secured  the 
satisfaction  of  this  overmastering  passion. 

Disraeli's  sincerity  then  was  real,  but  with  a  touch 
of  underlying   cynicism,  and   this   undoubtedly   told 


DISRAELI  19 

against  scrupulous  conscientiousness.  There  were 
certain  great  ideals  which  he  meant  to  realize.  If 
anything  was  worth  while,  they  were  worth  while, 
and,  to  some  extent,  the  end  justified  the  means. 
Petty  scruples  were  out  of  place. 

From  a  very  early  period  his  aim  was  largely  the 
achievement  of  a  democratic  Toryism,  the  develop- 
ment of  Toryism  into  nationalism.  He  had  not  been 
in  the  House  of  Commons  much  more  than  two  years 
when  he  wrote  to  the  popular  leader,  Mr.  Charles 
Attwood  : 

I  entirely  agree  with  you  that  a  union  between  the  Con- 
servative Party  and  the  Radical  masses  offers  the  only  means 
by  which  we  can  preserve  the  Empire.  Their  interests  are 
identical :  united  they  form  the  nation,  and  their  division  has 
only  prompted  a  miserable  minority  under  the  specious  name 
of  the  people  to  assail  all  rights  of  property  and  person. 

He  had  first  to  develop  popular  sympathies  in  the 
Tory  party.  Later  on  the  Crown  and  the  Empire 
occupied  a  large  space  in  the  ideal  which  he  placed 
before  his  followers.  He  was  also  actuated  in  his 
method  of  educating  his  party  by  a  very  permanent 
conviction  that  imagination  is  the  weapon  whereby 
the  greatest  things  are  achieved. 

We  are  not  indebted  to  the  Reason  of  man  [we  read  in 
Coningsby\  for  any  of  the  great  achievements  which  are  the 
landmarks  of  human  action  and  human  progress.  It  was  not 
Reason  that  besieged  Troy  ;  it  was  not  Reason  that  sent  forth 
the  Saracen  from  the  Desert  to  conquer  the  world  ;  that 
inspired  the  Crusades  ;  that  instituted  the  Monastic  Orders  ; 
it  was  not  Reason  that  produced  the  Jesuits ;  above  all,  it 
was  not  Reason  that  created  the  French  Revolution.  Man 
is  only  truly  great  when  he  acts  from  the  passions  ;  never 


20  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

irresistible  but  when  he  appeals  to  the  imagination.     Even 
Mormon  counts  more  votaries  than  Bentham. 

His  own  temperament  was  profoundly  imagina- 
tive, though  his  was  not  imagination  of  the  highest 
order.  It  is  true  that  he  kindled  at  some  great 
pictures  in  history,  and  had  brooding  dreams,  half 
true,  half  purely  imaginary,  concerning  his  own  Jewish 
ancestry.  But  his  imagination  was  also  most  vividly 
affected  by  the  passing  show  of  life  in  its  more  trivial 
and  even  tawdry  aspects.  He  loved  the  stage  effects  ; 
the  scene-painting  of  life.  A  fashionable  entertain- 
ment delighted  him  ;  the  number  of  servants,  the 
liveries,  the  silver  or  gold  plate,  the  cuisine  in  its 
minutest  details,  the  beautiful  dresses,  the  jewels ; 
none  of  it  was  lost  on  him.  He  loved  a  gathering  of 
the  English  aristocracy,  and  I  have  sometimes  thought 
that  the  high  place  which  its  countenance  occupied  in 
his  ideal  of  his  own  success,  his  strong  feeling  for  it, 
as  ranking  high  among  great  things — so  far  as  he 
believed  anything  to  be  great  at  all — had  something 
to  do  with  his  eventually  gaining  its  goodwill  in  spite 
of  unpromising  antecedents.  He  wooed  our  aristocracy 
long  and  persistently ;  he  touched  its  heart.  He  won 
and  even  vanquished  it  at  last.  His  letters  would 
seem  to  show  that  his  own  prominent  and  often  dis- 
tinguished position  at  gatherings  of  the  great  was 
among  the  keen  pleasures  of  his  life.  Doubtless  it 
was  to  him  largely  the  symbol  of  the  success  he  had 
achieved.  But  there  was  also  a  strong  ingredient  of 
the  Oriental  love  of  magnificence.  He  loved  the 
actual  material  show.  The  almost  limitless  degree  of 
this  enjoyment,  the  comparative  absence  of  fastidious 
taste  in  its  quality,  the  love  of  mere  splendour  and 
rich  and  lavish  display  are  distinctly  un-English. 


DISRAELI  21 

His  imagination,  indeed,  veritably  feasted  on  scenes 
of  splendour,  and  he  described  them  in  his  letters  with 
an  unwearied  pleasure  which  strikes  one  forcibly  in 
reading  them.  This  continues  long  after  the  first  blush 
of  success.  To  be  the  centre  of  or  a  prominent  figure 
in  a  showy  fashionable  pageant  seems  to  be  an  almost 
physical  enjoyment  to  him. 

I  suppose  there  were  several  ingredients  in  this 
cup  of  happiness.  It  was  all  a  new  experience  to  one 
of  his  modest  beginnings,  and  where  a  more  refined 
taste  would  shrink  from  the  glare  of  unwonted  splen- 
dour, his  own  theatrical  nature  basked  in  limelight  as 
in  sunshine.  Then  there  was  the  peculiar  pleasure  of 
what  we  win  by  hard  work.  Again,  pleasure  is  always 
enhanced  by  previous  abstinence.  Tennyson  once 
described  in  a  poem  the  warm  glow  of  full  life  which 
came  to  him  with  eating  a  chop  after  weeks  of  vegetable 
diet.  "  It  felt  like  strong  brandy,"  he  once  said  in 
speaking  of  it.  The  heavenly  peace  which  sometimes 
comes  in  convalescence  is  another  instance  of  the  same 
law — the  strain  of  illness  brings  this  compensation. 
Given  a  vivid,  but  not  a  refined  imagination,  small 
beginnings,  a  hard  struggle  for  success,  an  unappeas- 
able appetite  for  splendour,  and  many  sources  of 
pleasure  are  combined.  The  appetite  in  question  will 
be  both  stimulated  and  satisfied  as  far  as  it  can  be. 
Satisfied,  but  hardly  sated,  for  such  pleasures  seemed, 
in  Disraeli's  case,  never  to  pall. 

I  would  add  the  suggestion  that  there  is  something 
in  external  grandeur  which  appeals  to  a  sceptical  mind. 
Whatever  is  or  is  not  real,  the  show  is  there,  and  it  is 
real  for  the  sceptic  himself.  So  far  as  it  meets  his  eye, 
it  exists  for  him.  Whatever  is  or  is  not  truly  great, 
this  at  least  is  grand  to  look  at  and  stimulating  to  the 


22  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

senses  and  fancy.  I  have  known  several  cases  in 
which  the  taste  of  the  unsophisticated  and  simple 
mind  in  this  respect  is  shared — albeit  more  moderately 
— by  the  sceptic.  To  the  simple  mind  it  is  all  over- 
whelmingly real,  while  to  the  sceptic  it  is  more 
certainly  real  than  anything  else,  for  at  least  it  appears 
and  makes  a  great  show,  which  the  unseen  does  not. 

Disraeli's  literary  gift  was  remarkable,  but,  like  his 
imagination,  it  was  not  of  the  first  order.  It  proves  of 
great  value  to  his  biographer,  for  it  is  the  absence  of 
the  power  of  self-expression  in  many  great  statesmen 
that  is  apt  to  make  political  biographies  so  deficient  in 
the  play  of  human  life. 

Both  Coningsby  and  Sybil  are  invaluable  as  pictures 
of  Disraeli's  mind.  His  letters  also  are  highly  self- 
revealing,  and  his  early  speeches  owe  much  to  his 
literary  power.  Indeed,  Mr.  Monypenny  tells  us  that 
when  in  later  days  he  had  completely  caught  the 
House  of  Commons  manner  of  speaking  (not  entirely 
a  good  manner),  his  speeches  in  the  House  became 
far  less  effective  as  compositions.  Those  which  were 
made  in  the  days  when  his  literary  career  was  recent, 
and  his  sense  of  literary  effect  keenest,  are  far  better 
monuments  of  his  eloquence. 

It  is  hardly  an  exaggeration  to  say  that  the  very 
mediocrity  of  Disraeli's  endowment  with  the  qualities 
of  which  I  have  just  spoken  contributed  immensely  to 
his  success  in  politics.  A  more  sincere  man  or  a  less 
sincere  man  might  have  failed.  One  with  a  more  re- 
fined imagination  would  have  failed,  and  one  with  less 
imagination  could  not  have  done  what  he  did.  Again, 
the  finest  literary  taste  almost  invariably  means  the 
presence  of  the  artistic  temperament — a  temperament 
most  fatal  to  success  in  action.     This  weakness  never 


DISRAELI  23 

attacked  Disraeli ;  yet  his  powers  of  expression  con- 
tributed immensely  to  his  success. 

To  speak  first  of  his  sincerity.  There  is  no  doubt 
that  a  mere  opportunist  fails  to  reach  the  highest  point 
in  political  life.  He  cannot  easily  gain  followers,  or, 
if  he  gains  them,  he  cannot  continue  to  inspire  them. 
He  stands  too  fatally  convicted  of  egoism.  He  can 
represent  no  cause.  He  has  no  instrument  wherewith 
to  kindle  enthusiasm.  A  mere  actor  must  be  found 
out  in  the  long  run.  Thus  a  less  sincere  man  could 
not  have  "  arrived."  Yet  intense  sincerity  brings  with 
it  depth  of  principle  and  consequent  scrupulousness, 
which  are  often  a  great  drawback  in  difficult  enterprises. 
And  Disraeli's  drawbacks  were  already  great  enough. 
His  convictions  then  were  strong  enough  to  fire  him 
and  to  enable  him  to  fire  others  with  enthusiasm — not 
strong  enough  to  handicap  him.  His  entreaty  for  office 
under  Peel  in  1 841,  and  his  subsequent  attacks  on  Peel, 
presented  no  difficulty  as  they  would  have  done  to  one 
whose  convictions  were  deeper.  Both  moves  were 
largely  opportunist.  Yet  there  was  enough  of  con- 
viction in  his  personal  admiration  for  Peel,  and  in  his 
disagreement  with  Peel's  later  views  on  the  Corn 
Laws ;  enough  of  conviction  in  his  criticism  of  Peel's 
triple  apostasy  on  Emancipation,  Parliamentary  Re- 
form and  Free  Trade  to  enable  him  to  make  each 
move  in  some  sense  sincerely,  and  in  the  later  attack 
to  take  the  practical  leadership  of  a  party  effectively. 
The  same  holds  good  in  other  great  steps  in  his 
career.  When  he  "  dished  the  Whigs"  by  his  Reform 
Bill  in  '68,  though  it  was  a  clever  move  in  the  game, 
it  also  derived  some  inspiration  from  his  avowed 
devotion  to  the  popular  cause.  His  sincerity  reached 
its  highest  point  both  in  itself  and  in  its  influence  on 


24  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

others  in  the  Imperialist  campaign,  which  was  the  last 
in  his  life. 

As  for  his  imagination,  a  highly  imaginative  man 
is  apt  to  outstrip  the  practical  and  become  a  dreamer. 
Again,  a  love  of  splendour  like  Disraeli's  may  become 
enervating  and  lead  to  complete  inaction.  With 
Disraeli  on  the  contrary,  the  love  of  splendour  meant 
a  keen  appreciation  of  the  visible  symbols  of  success 
and  stimulated  him  to  further  success.  His  reception 
at  the  great  social  functions  in  which  he  revelled 
witnessed  to  the  position  he  had  won.  In  firing  his 
imagination  they  prompted  him  to  further  action. 
Moreover  his  imagination,  like  Napoleon's,  helped 
him  in  larger  fields  to  conceive  and  to  execute  great 
designs.  It  was  well  under  the  control  of  his  practical 
ambition. 

But  lastly,  his  considerable  literary  gift  never 
meant  that  high-strung  literary  temperament  which 
is  so  fatal  to  practical  effectiveness.  He  was  never  a 
morbid  or  hyper-sensitive  man.  These  are  qualities 
which  prove  the  deadly  foe  to  persevering  and  con- 
sistent action.  The  literary  temperament  often  means 
that  a  man  is  at  the  mercy  of  his  moods ;  that  he  acts 
one  way  one  day,  another  another ;  that  he  pursues 
one  line  with  intense  eagerness  for  a  time  and  then 
tires  of  it.  None  of  this  was  true  of  Disraeli  from  the 
very  limitations  of  his  literary  genius.  It  never 
carried  him  away.  He  kept  steadily  in  view  the  one 
cherished  goal.  He  was  not  a  man  who  might  in  one 
mood  devote  himself  to  Parliamentary  work  and  in 
another  tire  of  all  hard  work.  He  was  not  one  to 
brood  over  the  attacks  of  his  enemies,  or  to  be  brought 
low  by  those  acute  sufferings  which  attend  on  thinness 
of  mental  skin.     On  the  contrary,  his  skin  was  of  the 


DISRAELI  25 

toughest.  He  neither  had  the  piercing  insight  of  the 
artistic  temperament  nor  was  the  victim  of  its  paralyzing 
effects  on  consistent  action.  His  wife  said  of  him  that 
he  was  very  conceited,  but  not  vain ;  and  if  the  dis- 
tinction denotes  the  absence  in  his  self-complacency  of 
undue  sensitiveness  to  the  opinion  of  others,  the  remark 
was  entirely  just.  His  literary  gifts  gave  him  great 
facility  of  expression  and  of  mental  movement,  while 
they  never  reached  the  point  which  makes  the  typical 
literary  man  ineffective  in  action.  His  gift  of  expres- 
sion, his  imagination  and  his  sincerity  were  alike 
helpful  and  were  never  obstacles.  They  were  servants 
and  instruments  which  he  had  well  in  hand,  and 
could  use  with  great  skill.  They  were  never  his 
masters. 

There  is  a  remarkable  passage  in  Coningsby,  not 
without  its  significance  in  the  interpretation  of 
Disraeli's  political  ideals.  Speaking  of  the  two  years 
that  followed  the  Reform  Bill  of  1832,  he  writes  :  "  It 
is  hardly  possible  that  a  young  man  could  rise  from 
the  study  of  these  annals  without  a  confirmed  disgust 
for  political  intrigue — a  dazzling  practice  apt  at  first 
to  fascinate  youth,  for  it  appeals  at  once  to  our  inven- 
tion and  our  courage  ;  but  one  which  should  really 
only  be  the  resource  of  the  second  rate.  Great  minds 
must  trust  to  great  truths  and  great  talents  for  their 
rise,  and  nothing  else." 

On  the  whole,  I  think  that  Disraeli  was,  in  his 
own  career,  true  to  this  counsel.  This  does  not  mean 
that  he  was  incapable  of  intrigue  or  incapable  of 
opportunism  ;  but  it  does  mean  that  he  saw  clearly 
that  if  he  would  attain  to  the  great  position  at  which 
he  aimed,  such  methods  must  hold  a  minor  place.     It 


26  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

does  also  mean  that  he  saw  in  the  statesmanlike  aims 
of  which  he  was  conscious,  a  truer  road  to  success  and 
one  which  better  satisfied  his  own  ideal  than  mere 
intrigue.  In  his  own  way,  he  was  full  of  views  and 
ideas  which  he  desired  to  realize  in  the  world  of 
politics,  and  he  believed  them  to  be  true  enough 
and  persuasive  enough  to  enable  him  to  gain  a 
following. 

These  remarks,  while  they  can  only  be  fully  ap- 
preciated by  the  study  of  Disraeli's  career  as  a  whole, 
are,  in  their  measure,  applicable  to  the  brilliant  period 
of  his  career  set  before  us  in  Mr.  Monypenny's  second 
volume — the  account  of  his  rise  to  the  first  place  in 
his  party  by  means  of  the  attack  on  Peel.  In  his 
campaign  against  Peel's  proposed  repeal  of  the  Corn 
Laws,  I  see  the  eager  and  tenacious  seizing  of  an 
opportunity.  I  do  not  see  either  personal  resent- 
ment or  political  insincerity,  with  both  of  which  he 
has  been  credited  by  Lord  Cromer  in  his  well- 
known  essay  on  Disraeli.  That  he  saw  a  telling 
opportunity  which  made  for  success  he  himself 
expressly  avows.  "  The  opportune,"  he  writes,  in 
describing  his  first  speech  in  the  campaign,  "has 
sometimes  more  success  in  a  popular  assembly  than 
the  weightiest  efforts  of  research  and  reason."  But, 
in  using  his  opportunity,  he  did  not  lack  conviction. 
On  the  contrary,  his  action  was  opportune  just  because 
of  the  convictions  in  himself  and  others  which  called 
at  the  moment  for  forcible  expression.  The  strong 
personal  element  visible  in  the  attacks  on  Peel  was, 
I  think,  carefully  designed  for  effect.  Lord  Cromer 
ascribes  it  to  resentment  against  Peel  for  having 
refused  him  office  in  184 1.  I  take  leave  to  doubt  this. 
Disraeli  was  too  long-headed  to  be  carried  away  by 


DISRAELI  27 

resentment.  Two  years  had  passed  since  the  refusal 
before  he  attacked  Peel  at  all — a  sufficient  interval  to 
enable  the  greatest  anger  to  cool.  No ;  the  policy 
was  calculated.  It  was  due  to  no  animosity  against 
Peel.  He  thought  much  more  about  himself  than  he 
did  about  Peel.  It  was  due  to  a  desire  to  advance 
himself.  The  brilliancy  of  his  earliest  personal  sallies 
against  Peel  had  already  immensely  advertised  him, 
and  when  the  Corn  Law  question  came  to  the  front, 
the  very  greatness  of  the  opportunity  was  this,  that 
attacks  which  had  at  first  brought  only  immediate 
notoriety  now  gave  occasion  for  the  assertion  of 
principles  which  moved  men  deeply  and  gained  him 
a  following  which  mere  notoriety  could  never  have 
secured.  It  was  not  a  mere  intrigue.  He  seized  an 
opportunity  for  advocating  a  great  policy.  Indeed, 
a  merely  opportunist  course  would  have  greatly 
weakened  his  position  and  laid  him  open  to  damaging 
retort,  for  his  very  charge  against  Peel  was  one  of 
opportunism.  Peel  was,  he  maintained,  sacrificing  the 
avowed  protectionist  principles  of  the  party  to  a  policy 
dictated  by  a  general  panic.  He  was  falling  in  with 
the  general  alarm  in  order  to  maintain  his  place. 

This  is  nowhere  expressed  by  him  more  clearly 
than  in  one  of  the  earliest  and  most  brilliant  of  these 
sallies  in  the  House  of  Commons.  "  My  conception  of  a 
great  statesman,"  he  said,  "is  of  one  who  represents 
a  great  idea — an  idea  which  may  lead  him  to  power, 
an  idea  with  which  he  may  connect  himself  ...  an 
idea  which  he  may  and  can  impress  on  the  mind  and 
consciousness  of  a  nation  .  .  .  that  is  a  grand,  that  is 
indeed  a  heroic  position.  But  I  care  not  what  may 
be  the  position  of  a  man  who  never  originates  an  idea, 
a  watcher  of  the  atmosphere,  a  man  who,  as  he  says, 


28  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

takes  his  observations  and  when  he  finds  the  wind  in 
a  certain  quarter  trims  to  suit  it.  Such  a  person  may 
be  a  powerful  Minister,  but  he  is  no  more  a  great 
statesman  than  the  man  who  gets  up  behind  a  carriage 
is  a  great  whip.  Certainly,  both  are  disciples  of  pro- 
gress ;  perhaps  both  may  get  a  good  place,  but  how 
far  the  original  momentum  is  indebted  to  their  powers, 
and  how  far  their  guiding  prudence  applies  the  lash 
or  regulates  the  reins,  it  is  not  necessary  for  me  to 
notice." 

Disraeli,  then,  was  statesmanlike  in  his  maintenance 
of  principle,  statesmanlike  also  in  his  prescience,  while 
he  was  bent  on  success.  As  to  the  Corn  Laws,  he  saw 
then  what  our  generation  now  realizes,  that  the  true 
alternative  lay,  not  between  the  old  protective  system 
and  out  and  out  Cobdenism,  in  a  Europe  which  was 
not  prepared  to  accept  the  latter  alternative,  but  in 
relaxing  the  old  protective  system  as  circumstances 
demanded — gradually  and  carefully  and  with  a  special 
eye  on  the  interests  of  agriculture.  Common-sense 
and  conviction  are  alike  visible  in  the  following  retort 
to  one  of  'Peel's  speeches  avowedly  in  favour  of  com- 
plete repeal,  but  forcible  in  Disraeli's  view  only  in  so 
far  as  it  proved  the  desirability  of  moderating  the 
protective  system : 

The  whole  speech  only  proved  the  advantage  of  the 
principle  of  a  moderate  protection.  ("  Oh  !  ")  I  am  sorry,  sir, 
to  have  excited  that  groan  from  a  free  trader  in  distress. 
(Great  laughter.)  I  want  to  ask  the  right  hon.  gentleman  a 
very  important  question :  Does  he  believe  that  he  can  fight 
hostile  tariffs  with  free  imports  ?  That  is  the  point.  ("  Hear, 
hear  !  ")  "  Hear,  hear !  "  from  the  disciples  of  the  school  of 
Manchester  !  A  most  consistent  cheer !  They  have  always 
maintained  they  can  ;  and  if  their  principles  are  right,  as  they 


DISRAELI  29 

believe  they  are — as  I  believe  they  are  not — I  can  easily 
understand  that,  their  premises  being  assumed,  they  may 
arrive  at  that  conclusion.  They  believe  they  can  fight  hostile 
tariffs  with  free  imports,  and  they  tell  us  very  justly  :  "  Let 
us  take  care  of  our  imports,  and  everything  else  will  take  care 
of  itself."  But  is  that  the  conviction  of  the  right  hon.  gentle- 
man ?  We  want  to  know  that,  because  if  that  be  his  convic- 
tion, why  all  these  elegies  over  defunct  diplomatic  negotiations 
to  preserve  commercial  treaties  ?  If  he  believes  that  we  can 
meet  hostile  tariffs  with  free  imports,  he  need  not  trouble 
himself  about  commercial  treaties.  But  if  the  right  hon. 
gentleman  does  not  believe  that,  if  he  has  not  the  conviction 
of  the  school  of  Manchester,  then  he  is  not  justified  in  offering 
this  measure. 

As  long-  as  free  trade  was  a  sacred  dogma  among 
English  economists  this  position  which  Disraeli  con- 
sistently held  appeared  to  them  not  worth  arguing 
with.  It  was  therefore  not  readily  believed  in  as  the 
sincere  conviction  of  an  acute  thinker.  This  view  of 
the  case  has  been  taken  for  the  most  part  by  the 
historians.  But  our  own  generation  is  in  a  position 
to  do  Disraeli  more  justice. 

While,  so  far  as  economic  principle  was  concerned, 
Disraeli  saw  more  truly  than  the  Cobdenites,  we  find 
incidentally  in  his  speeches  at  this  time  a  further  and 
deeper  prevision  unconnected  with  the  special  matter 
in  hand.  More  than  once  he  took  occasion  to  hint  at 
a  future  for  the  Tory  party  as  the  champion  of  demo- 
cracy— an  idea  which  was  anything  but  congenial  to 
the  country  gentlemen  whose  cause  he  was  pleading  ; 
and  his  remarks  were  the  result  of  a  very  carefully 
thought  out  view  of  the  signs  of  the  times  of  which 
our  own  day  has  witnessed  the  truth. 

Writing  in  the  'forties  of  the  discussions  of  1831 
and  1832  on  the  Reform  Bill,  he  pointed  out  that  the 


30  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

essence  of  the  English  constitution  was  the  balance  of 
the  three  estates  of  the  realm,  the  crown,  the  peers 
and  the  "  community  " — a  term  which  probably  des- 
cribed the  inferior  holders  of  land  whose  tenure  was 
not  immediate  of  the  Crown.  This  last  and  third 
estate  was  so  numerous  that  it  appeared  only  by 
representation.  But  he  adds  :  "In  treating  the  house 
of  the  third  estate  as  the  house  of  the  people  and  not 
the  house  of  a  privileged  class,  the  ministry  and 
Parliament  of  183 1  virtually  conceded  the  principle 
of  universal  suffrage." 

The  graphic  description  in  Coningsby  of  the  Duke 
of  Wellington's  ineffectual  attempt  to  resist  this  revo- 
lution is  succeeded  by  the  following  account  of  its 
sequel : 

The  Reform  Party,  who  had  been  rather  stupefied  than 
appalled  by  the  accepted  mission  of  the  Duke  of  Wellington, 
collected  their  scattered  senses,  and  rallied  their  forces.  The 
agitators  harangued,  the  mobs  hooted.  The  City  of  London, 
as  if  the  King  had  again  tried  to  seize  the  five  members, 
appointed  a  permanent  committee  of  the  Common  Council  to 
watch  the  fortunes  of  the  "  great  national  measure,"  and  to 
report  daily.  Brooks',  which  was  the  only  place  that  at  first 
was  really  frightened  and  talked  of  compromise,  grew  valiant 
again  ;  while  young  Whig  heroes  jumped  upon  club-room 
tables  and  delivered  fiery  invectives.  Emboldened  by  these 
demonstrations,  the  House  of  Commons  met  in  great  force, 
and  passed  a  vote  which  struck,  without  disguise,  at  all  rival 
powers  in  the  State,  virtually  announced  its  supremacy, 
revealed  the  forlorn  position  of  the  House  of  Lords  under  the 
new  arrangement,  and  seemed  to  lay  for  ever  the  fluttering 
phantom  of  regal  prerogative. 

This   view   of  the   significance   of  the   situation, 
startlingly  realized  in  our  own  time  by  the  passing  of 


DISRAELI  31 

the  Parliament  Act,  determined  Disraeli's  own  political 
course,  and  it  appealed,  in  many  respects,  to  his 
sympathies.  The  future,  he  saw,  was  with  the  demo- 
cracy. The  hope  for  the  Tory  party  lay  not  in  an 
unintelligent  refusal  to  recognize  the  inevitable,  but 
in  forming  an  alliance  between  the  aristocracy  and 
democracy  which  might  make  the  party  once  more 
a  real  power  in  the  altered  conditions  of  the  consti- 
tution. 

Speaking  in  1846,  he  said  :  "  If  we  must  find  new 
forces  to  maintain  the  ancient  throne  and  immemorial 
monarchy  of  England,  I,  for  one,  hope  we  may  find 
that  universal  power  in  the  invigorating  energies  of 
an  educated  and  enfranchised  people."  And  later  on, 
in  a  telling  retort  to  Roebuck,  the  member  for  Bath, 
he  hints  that  his  sympathies  as  well  as  his  reason  are 
in  the  same  direction.  This  passage  is  worth  quoting 
as  a  sample  of  Disraeli's  speaking.  Roebuck  had 
recalled  the  old  charge  that  Disraeli  first  aspired  to 
Parliament  with  the  assistance  of  two  Radicals — 
Hume  and  O'Connell — and  suggested  that  he  might 
come  back  into  his  (Roebuck's)  camp.  Disraeli 
retorted  as  follows : 

I  am  not  in  a  condition  to  have  had  hereditary  opinions 
carved  out  for  me,  and  all  my  opinions,  therefore,  have  been 
the  result  of  reading  and  thought.  I  never  was  a  follower  of 
either  of  the  two  great  aristocratic  parties  in  this  country. 
My  sympathies  and  feelings  have  always  been  with  the  people 
from  whom  I  spring  ;  and  when  obliged  as  a  member  of  this 
House  to  join  a  party,  I  joined  that  party  with  which  I  believe 
the  people  sympathize.  I  continue  to  hold  substantially  the 
same  opinions  as  I  have  always  professed  ;  and  when  the  hon. 
member  talks  of  my  going  "into  his  camp,"  I  never  heard 
that  he  had  a  camp.  How  the  solitary  sentry  talks  of  his 
garrison  !     He  a  leader  of  the  people !     In  my  opinion,  there 


32  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

is  no  greater  opponent  of  real  democracy  than  a  modern 
Liberal. 

I  emphasize  these  two  declarations  as  indicating 
the  point  for  which  I  am  contending :  that  Disraeli's 
programme  all  along  was  determined  by  larger  views 
than  those  whereby  the  mere  opportunist  seeks  for 
immediate  success.  Such  declarations  of  democratic 
sympathy  could  not  have  been  especially  welcome  to 
the  aristocratic  section  of  the  Tory  party,  with  which 
Disraeli  was  at  the  moment  identifying  himself.  Had 
he  looked  only  to  immediate  influence,  had  his  method 
been  confined  simply  and  solely  to  strengthening  his 
position  with  the  party,  he  would  not  have  gone  out 
of  his  way  to  proclaim  views  so  widely  unwelcome  to 
them. 

Taking,  then,  the  two  instruments  which  Disraeli 
advocated  for  the  attainment  of  success — great  talents 
and  great  truths — it  is  clear  enough  that  there  was  no 
lack  of  what  he  himself  regarded  as  great  truths  in 
his  first  important  Parliamentary  campaign — his  attack 
on  the  proposed  repeal  of  the  Corn  Laws.  When  we 
come  to  the  exercise  of  his  great  talents  on  the 
occasion,  the  record  is  not  so  entirely  satisfactory. 
Disraeli's  talents  included  prominently  an  extraordinary 
gift  for  personal  attack  which  was  apt  to  degenerate 
into  invective.  In  the  acute  tension  of  this  memorable 
struggle,  it  was  natural  enough  that  he  should  use  to 
its  utmost  extent  this  his  special  gift.  Moreover,  he 
had  tested  its  effect  on  the  House  of  Commons  in 
attacking  Peel  before  the  Corn  Law  struggle  began, 
and  with  brilliant  results. 

Up  to  a  certain  point  his  attacks  on  Peel  in  1846 
were  justifiable.     They  belonged  to  that  opportunism 


DISRAELI  33 

which  may  be  regarded  as  legitimate.  Peel's  action 
offered  an  extraordinarily  good  target.  Although  the 
absolute  sincerity  of  his  conversion  to  Cobdenism  is 
undeniable,  his  party  had  been  elected  as  staunch 
protectionists.  The  mandate  of  the  people  was  not, 
indeed,  in  those  days  as  imperative  or  as  exacting  as 
it  is  now.  Still,  it  had  to  be  reckoned  with,  and  the 
mandate  to  the  Tories  was  based  on  a  protectionist 
programme.  The  potato  famine  in  Ireland  had 
thoroughly  alarmed  Peel,  and  he  had  come  to  think 
that  the  repeal  of  the  Corn  Laws  was  the  only  wise 
course  under  the  circumstances.  He  recognized  in 
the  first  instance  the  almost  impossibility  of  the  Tory 
protectionist  party  undertaking  this  measure.  He 
resigned,  and  Lord  John  Russell  was  sent  for  by  the 
Queen.  Repeal  was  obviously  a  measure  naturally 
falling  to  a  Liberal  administration.  When,  however, 
Lord  John  had  failed  to  form  his  ministry,  Peel  took 
office  again  with  the  avowed  object  of  reversing  the 
policy  which  was  an  essential  part  of  the  original  Tory 
programme.  So  far  as  Disraeli  confined  himself  to 
scathing  attacks  on  this  course  of  action,  he  was 
playing  the  game  fairly  enough.  In  one  of  his  wittiest 
and  most  effective  speeches  he  pilloried  Peel  by  the 
following  ludicrous  comparison  : 

Sir,  there  is  a  difficulty  in  finding  a  parallel  to  the  position 
of  the  right  hon.  gentleman  in  any  part  of  history.  The 
only  parallel  which  I  can  find  is  an  incident  in  the  late  war  in 
the  Levant,  which  was  terminated  by  the  policy  of  the  noble 
lord  opposite.  I  remember  when  that  great  struggle  was 
taking  place,  when  the  existence  of  the  Turkish  Empire  was 
at  stake,  the  late  Sultan,  a  man  of  great  energy  and  fertile  in 
resources,  was  determined  to  fit  out  an  immense  fleet  to 
maintain  his  empire.     Accordingly    a    vast   armament   was 

D 


34  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

collected.  The  crews  were  picked  men,  the  officers  were  the 
ablest  that  could  be  found,  and  both  officers  and  men  were 
rewarded  before  they  fought.  (Much  laughter.)  There  never 
was  an  armament  which  left  the  Dardanelles  similarly 
appointed  since  the  days  of  Solyman  the  Great.  The  Sultan 
personally  witnessed  the  departure  of  the  fleet ;  all  the  muftis 
prayed  for  the  expedition,  as  all  the  muftis  here  prayed  for 
the  success  of  the  last  general  election.  Away  went  the  fleet, 
but  what  was  the  Sultan's  consternation  when  the  Lord  High 
Admiral  steered  at  once  into  the  enemy's  port.  (Loud 
laughter  and  cheers.)  Now,  sir,  the  Lord  High  Admiral  on 
that  occasion  was  very  much  misrepresented.  He,  too,  was 
called  a  traitor,  and  he,  too,  vindicated  himself.  "  True  it  is," 
said  he,  "  I  did  place  myself  at  the  head  of  this  valiant 
armada ;  true  it  is  that  my  Sovereign  embraced  me  ;  true  it 
is  that  all  the  muftis  in  the  empire  offered  up  prayers  for  the 
expedition  ;  but  I  have  no  affection  for  war,  I  see  no  use  in 
prolonging  the  struggle,  and  the  only  reason  I  had  for 
accepting  the  command  was  that  I  might  terminate  the 
contest  by  betraying  my  master."  (Tremendous  Tory 
cheering.) 

This  speech  and  its  fellows  were  immensely 
effective,  and  in  delivering  them  Disraeli  was  above 
serious  criticism  on  the  score  of  excessive  personalities. 
But  in  the  exuberance  of  success  he  went  much  further. 
He  attacked  Peel's  whole  political  character.  He 
denounced  him  as  an  out-and-out  opportunist,  a  mere 
trimmer.  "  Nursed  in  the  House  of  Commons,"  he 
said  in  one  speech,  "  entertaining  no  idea  but  that  of 
Parliamentary  success,  if  you  wish  to  touch  him  to  the 
quick  you  must  touch  him  on  the  state  of  the  poll." 

When  Peel  impressively  spoke  of  looking  in  his 
policy  to  the  verdict  of  posterity,  Disraeli  con- 
temptuously retorted  that  the  only  future  to  which 
such  statesmen  as  he  were  sensitive  was  M  the  coming 
quarter-day."     He  taunted  Peel  with  his  whole  past 


DISRAELI  35 

career, — his  political  apostasy  on  emancipation,  on 
Parliamentary  reform,  as  well  as  on  the  fiscal  ques- 
tion. Peel's  present,  he  argued,  was  but  in  keeping 
with  his  past.  Here  Disraeli  laid  himself  open  to  a 
most  damaging  retort.  He  had  in  1841  besought 
Peel  to  give  him  office.  There  is  nothing  unjust  or 
unreasonable  in  condemning  utterly  on  a  specific  point 
the  policy  of  a  Minister  whom  nevertheless  one  may 
have  respected  and  trusted  sufficiently  to  join  his 
administration.  But  if  Peel  were  the  utterly  untrust- 
worthy opportunist  whom  Disraeli  was  now  describing, 
how  came  it  that  Disraeli  himself  had  only  five  years 
earlier  desired  to  join  his  ministry  ?  Peel  drove  home 
this  argument  with  great  dignity  and  effect.  "If,"  he 
said,  "after  reviewing  my  whole  public  life — a  life 
extending  from  thirty  years  previously  to  my  accession 
to  office  in  1841 — he  then  entertained  the  opinion  of 
me  which  he  now  professes,  ...  it  is  a  little  surprising 
that  in  the  spring  of  1841,  after  his  long  experience  of 
my  public  career  he  should  have  been  prepared  to 
give  me  his  confidence.  It  is  still  more  surprising 
that  he  should  have  been  ready,  as  I  think  he  was,  to 
unite  his  fortunes  with  mine  in  office,  thus  implying 
the  strongest  proof  which  any  public  man  can  give  of 
confidence  in  the  honour  and  integrity  of  a  Minister 
of  the  Crown." 

This  speech  was  followed  by  the  famous  reply  of 
Disraeli  which  is  quoted  as  the  classical  instance  of 
his  mendacity.  Disraeli  admitted  that  there  had  been 
some  communication  between  him  and  the  Govern- 
ment, originating  in  a  confidential  friend  of  Sir  Robert 
Peel.  But  he  denied  having  asked  for  office.  He 
added,  however  :  u  It  is  very  possible  if  in  1841  I  had 
been  offered  office — I  dare  say  it  would  have  been  a 


36  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

very   slight   office — but    I   dare   say    I    should   have 
accepted  it." 

A  year  earlier  he  had  already  denied  in  a  speech 
to  his  constituents  that  he  had  ever  asked  for  office. 
And  even  Mr.  Monypenny  does  not  venture  to  acquit 
Disraeli  of  sheer  untruthfulness  in  these  denials.     Yet 
one   may  venture  to  take  a   more   favourable   view 
and  to  believe  that  these  denials  may  well  have  been 
simply  due  to  a  lapse  of  memory.     The  present  writer 
came  across  a  curiously  parallel  case  in  dealing  with 
the  letters  of  Cardinal  Newman,  a  case  in  which  this 
explanation  was  undoubtedly  the  true  one.     Newman 
was  charged  in  the  Standard  newspaper  in  1869  w^tn 
having  in  a  letter  to  a  friend  designated  the  advanced 
champions  of  Papal   Infallibility  as  "an  insolent  and 
aggressive  faction."     Newman   publicly   denied   that 
he  had  ever  used  such  words,  but  admitted  that  they 
were  not  alien  to  his  sentiments.     In  the  end  it  was 
proved  that   he   had   used   them.     He   remembered 
accurately,  that  is,  his  state  of  mind,  but  he  had  a 
strong  impression  that  he  had  not  expressed  it.     So, 
too,   Disraeli  did  not  deny  that  he  had  been   ready 
to  accept  office,  but  only  that  he  had  actually  asked 
for  it.      No  one  who  knows  anything  of  Newman's 
character   would   doubt  for  a  moment  that   his   was 
simply  a  case  of  a  keen  and  over-confident  memory 
going  wrong. 

In  Disraeli's  instance  the  letter  in  which  he 
asked  for  office  was  such  that  it  might  easily  have 
remained  in  his  mind  as  having  been  rather  a  re- 
monstrance at  getting  nothing  than  a  direct  request 
for  office.  It  was  written  not  before  Peel  formed  his 
ministry,  but  when  he  had  nearly  completed  it.  The 
burden  of  the  letter  was  a  remonstrance  and  a  reminder 


DISRAELI  37 

of  his  services  to  the  party  and  of  the  intimation  he 
professed  to  have  received  from  a  member  of  Peel's 
Cabinet  that  those  services  would  be  rewarded.  Peel, 
in  his  reply,  dwelt  entirely  upon  this  charge  of  break- 
ing a  promise,  and  Disraeli's  further  rejoinder  dealt 
exclusively  with  this  point,  and  did  not  renew  the 
request  for  office.  It  is  surely  by  no  means  improbable 
that  the  correspondence  may  have  dwelt  in  his  mind 
as  only  a  remonstrance — which  carried,  no  doubt,  the 
implication  that  if  at  the  eleventh  hour  he  was  offered 
some  post  he  would  accept  it,  but  did  not  include  a 
positive  request  for  office.  Mr.  Monypenny  tells  us 
that  Disraeli  kept  no  copy  of  his  letter;  and  it  was 
obviously  written  in  a  hurry.  This  view  of  the  case 
is  at  least  quite  a  conceivable  one,  sufficiently  within 
the  realms  of  possibility  to  call,  in  any  case,  for  a 
suspension  of  judgment.  And  when  we  consider  the 
overwhelming  damage  which  would  have  been  inflicted 
on  Disraeli  if  the  letter  had  been  found  and  published 
by  Peel,  we  may  feel  that,  whatever  view  we  hold  of 
his  morality,  his  sagacity  would  have  prevented  his 
taking  the  risk  involved  in  his  two  denials  had  he 
accurately  remembered  the  letter. 

This  phase,  then,  in  Disraeli's  attack  on  Peel, 
while  it  is  fairly  open  to  the  charge  that  he  was 
carried  away  in  the  heat  of  the  struggle  into  giving 
a  more  damaging  estimate  of  Peel's  political  char- 
acter than  he  really  entertained,  does  not,  in  my 
judgment,  at  all  certainly  include  the  serious  blot 
on  his  veracity  of  which  his  enemies  have  made 
so  much.  Let  us  recall  his  own  words  in  reference 
to  Peel  himself  as  to  the  duty  of  generous  judg- 
ment in  the  case  of  a  great  statesman.  "  In  passing 
judgment  on  public  men,  it  behoves  us  ever  to  take 


qct  *  o^-f 


38  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

large  and  extended  views  of  their  conduct,  and  pre- 
vious incidents  will  often  satisfactorily  explain  subse- 
quent events  which,  without  their  illustrating  aid,  are 
involved  in  misapprehension  or  mystery." 

The  account  of  these  years  would  be  far  from 
complete  if  it  did  not  give  us  (as  Mr.  Monypenny 
does)  a  picture  of  Disraeli's  social  triumphs.  His  own 
description  of  these  to  his  beloved  and  sympathetic 
sister  Sarah  illustrate  the  excessive  imaginative 
pleasure  he  took  in  this  aspect  of  his  life — a  charac- 
teristic of  which  I  have  already  spoken, — and  his 
transparent  satisfaction  at  all  the  attentions  that  were 
paid  to  him. 

Here  is  an  account  written  to  his  sister  of  an 
entertainment  by  the  Londonderrys  (after  a  review  in 
Hyde  Park),  which  "  was  so  magnificent,"  as  he 
declares  in  the  course  of  his  description,  "  that  every- 
body lost  their  presence  of  mind." 

July  ii,  1838. 
Yesterday,  the  day  being  perfect,  there  was  a  splendid 
review  in  Hyde  Park.  I  saw  it  admirably  from  Mrs.  Wynd- 
ham's.  The  De  La  Warrs,  Rolles,  Lawrence  Peels  and  Dawsons 
were  there,  -but  no  one  was  allowed  to  be  on  the  drawing- 
room  floor,  lest  there  should  be  an  appearance  of  a  party, 
except  old  Lord  Rolle  and  myself  to  be  his  companion.  Lord 
R.  sat  in  the  balcony,  with  a  footman  each  side  of  him,  as  is 
his  custom.  The  Londonderrys,  after  the  review,  gave  the 
most  magnificent  banquet  at  Holdernesse  House  conceivable. 
Nothing  could  be  more  recJiercht.  There  were  only  150 
asked,  and  all  sat  down.  Fanny  was  faithful  and  asked  me, 
and  I  figure  in  the  Morning  Post  accordingly.  It  was  the 
finest  thing  of  the  season.  Londonderry's  regiment  being 
reviewed,  we  had  the  band  of  the  10th  playing  on  the  stair- 
case, the  whole  of  the  said  staircase  (a  double  one)  being 
crowded  with   the    most   splendid  orange   trees   and   Cape 


DISRAELI  39 

jessamines  ;  the  Duke  of  Nemours,  Soult,  all  the  "  illustrious 
strangers,"  the  Duke  and  the  very  flower  of  fashion  being 
assembled.  The  banquet  was  in  the  gallery  of  sculpture  ;  it 
was  so  magnificent  that  everybody  lost  their  presence  of 
mind.  Sir  James  Graham  said  to  me  that  he  had  never  in 
his  life  seen  anything  so  gorgeous.  "This  is  the  grand 
seigneur  indeed,"  he  added.  I  think  it  was  the  kindest 
thing  possible  of  Fanny  asking  me,  as  it  was  not  to  be 
expected  in  any  way.  The  splendour  of  the  uniforms  was 
remarkable. 

The  Disraeli  atmosphere  is  equally  visible  in  the 
following  account  by  Mrs.  Disraeli  of  a  function  at 
the  Duke  of  Buckingham's  at  Stow  in  1845,  at  which 
the  Queen  was  present : 

We  were  for  the  first  hour  in  the  vestibule,  like  a  flock  of 
sheep,  half  lit  up,  and  no  seats  or  fire,  only  a  little  hot  air 
and  a  great  deal  of  cold  wind  ;  a  marble  floor.  Fancy,  dear, 
shivering  Dizzy,  and  cross-looking  Mary  Anne,  in  black 
velvet,  hanging  sleeves  looped  up  with  knots  of  blue,  and 
diamond  buttons.  Head-dress,  blue  velvet  bows  and  diamonds. 
After  a  time  we  passed  Her  Majesty  and  the  Prince,  the 
Duke  and  Duchess  and  the  rest  standing  behind,  the  Duke 
giving  our  names  exactly  the  same  as  an  ordinary  groom, 
and  we  making  our  curtseys  and  bows.  About  eleven,  or 
soon  after,  Her  Majesty  retired,  and  then  all  became  joy  and 
triumph  to  us.  First,  Sir  Robert  Peel  came  to  us,  shaking 
hands  most  cordially,  and  remained  talking  for  some  time  ; 
then  Lord  Nugent,  introducing  his  lady,  Colonel  Anson,  Sir 
James  Graham,  Lord  and  Lady  de  La  Warr,  Lord  Aberdeen. 
The  Duke  almost  embraced  Dizzy,  saying  he  was  one  of  his 
oldest  friends  ;  and  then  he  offered  me  his  arm,  taking  me 
all  through  the  gorgeous  splendid  scene,  through  the  supper 
room  and  back  again,  down  the  middle  and  up  again — all 
making  way  for  us,  the  Queen  and  your  delighted  Mary  Anne 
being  the  only  ladies  so  distinguished.  After  this  I  retired 
to  a  sofa,  with  the  Duchess,  who  told  me  that  Her  Majesty 


40  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

had  pointed  Dizzy  out,  saying :  "  There's  Mr.  Disraeli."  Do 
you  call  all  this  nothing  ?  The  kind  Duchess  asked  me  to 
luncheon  the  next  day  and  to  see  the  Queen's  private 
apartments. 

A  hasty  reader  of  these  triumphant  records  of 
Disraeli's  own  social  successes,  written  by  himself  and 
his  wife,  might  be  inclined  to  class  him  among  the 
snobs.  But  this  would  be  a  mistake.  His  underlying 
cynicism,  his  belief  in  his  own  genius  and  in  the  great- 
ness of  the  Jewish  race  largely  qualified  his  feelings 
towards  that  great  world  which  he  recognized  never- 
theless as  so  important  in  the  visible  drama  of  public 
life.     He  had  not  the  soul  of  a  snob. 

Disraeli's  interviews  with  Louis  Phillippe  while  in 
Paris  in  1842,  probably  kindled  his  imagination  yet 
more  than  the  scenes  of  the  great  world  in  his  own 
country.  He  was  received  with  great  distinction. 
He  discussed  international  politics  with  the  French 
King.  The  visit  was  repeated  in  1845,  and  led  to 
interviews  with  Guizot  and  a  correspondence  with 
Lord  Palmerston  on  the  relations  between  the  two 
countries. 

Here  is  Disraeli's  account  of  his  first  dinner  at  the 
Tuileries : 

On  Saturday  last  I  received  a  command  to  dine  at  the 
Tuileries  on  the  following  Monday  at  6  o'clock.  I  was 
ushered,  through  a  suite  of  about  twenty  illuminated  rooms, 
to  the  chamber  of  reception,  where  I  formed  one  of  the  circle, 
and  where  I  found  seated  the  Queen  of  Sardinia,  at  present 
a  guest,  and  her  ladies.  Soon  after  the  Court  entered  and 
went  round  the  grand  circle.  I  was  the  only  stranger,  though 
there  were  sixty  guests.  Dinner  was  immediately  announced, 
the  King  leading  out  the  Queen  of  Sardinia,  and  there  were 
so  many  ladies  that  an  Italian  princess,  duchess  or  countess 


DISRAELI  41 

fell  to  my  share.  We  dined  in  the  gallery  of  Diana,  one  of 
the  chefs-d'ceuvre  of  Louis  XVI.  and  one  of  the  most  splendid 
apartments  perhaps  in  the  world.  ...  In  the  evening  the 
King  personally  showed  the  Tuileries  to  the  Queen  of  Sar- 
dinia, and  the  first  lady  in  waiting,  the  Marquise  de  Dolomieu, 
invited  me,  and  so  did  the  King,  to  join  the  party,  only  eight. 
It  is  rare  to  make  the  tour  of  a  palace  with  a  King  for  the 
cicerone.  In  the  evening  there  was  a  reception  of  a  few 
individuals,  but  I  should  have  withdrawn  had  not  the  King 
addressed  me  and  maintained  a  conversation  with  me  of  great 
length.  He  walked  into  an  adjoining  room,  and  motioned 
me  to  seat  myself  on  the  same  sofa.  While  we  conversed 
the  chamberlain  occasionally  entered  and  announced  guests. 
"  S.  A.  le  Prince  de  Ligne,"  the  new  Ambassador  of  Belgium. 
u  J'arrive,"  responded  His  Majesty  very  impatiently,  but  he 
never  moved.  At  last  even  majesty  was  obliged  to  move,  but 
he  signified  his  wish  that  I  should  attend  the  palace  in  the 
evenings.  .  .  . 

You  must  understand  that  I  am  the  only  stranger  who  has 
been  received  at  Court.  It  causes  a  great  sensation  here. 
There  is  no  Court  at  present,  on  account  of  the  death  of  the 
Duke  of  Orleans  ;  and  the  Ailesburys,  Stanhopes  and  Russian 
princes  cannot  obtain  a  reception.  The  King  speaks  of  me 
to  many  with  great  kudos. 

In  a  later  reminiscence  of  Louis  Phillippe  we  have 
a  very  curious  account  of  one  personal  peculiarity  of 
that  King  which  recalled  his  earlier  life  of  vicissitude 
and  adventure  : 

In  the  King's  time  there  never  was  a  dinner  given  at  the 
Tuileries,  no  matter  how  stately,  without  a  huge  smoking  ham 
being  placed,  at  a  certain  time,  before  the  King.  Upon  this 
he  operated  like  a  conjurer.  The  rapidity  and  precision  with 
which  he  carved  it  was  a  marvellous  feat ;  the  slices  were 
vast,  but  wafer-thin.  It  was  his  great  delight  to  carve  this 
ham,  and  indeed  it  was  a  wonderful  performance.  He  told 
me  one  day  that  he  had  learnt  the  trick  from  a  waiter  at 


4*  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

Bucklersbury,  where  he  used  to  dine  once  at  an  eating-house 
for  ninepence  per  head. 

One  day  he  called  out  to  an  honest  Englishman  that  he 
was  going  to  send  him  a  slice  of  ham,  and  the  honest  English- 
man— some  consul,  if  I  recollect  right,  who  had  been  kind  to 
the  King  in  America  in  the  days  of  his  adversity — not  used 
to  Courts,  replied  that  he  would  rather  not  take  any.  The 
King  drew  up  and  said  :  "  I  did  not  ask  whether  you  would 
take  any  ;  I  said  I  would  send  you  some."  A  little  trait,  but 
characteristic  of  the  dash  of  the  grand  seigneur,  which  I  often 
observed  latent  in  L.  Phillippe,  though  from  his  peculiar 
temperament  and  his  adventurous  life  of  strange  vicissitude 
he  was  peculiarly  deficient  in  dignity.  .  .  . 


There  can  be  little  doubt  that  this  period  of  rapid 
rise  to  fame  was  a  very  happy  one  in  Disraeli's  life — 
perhaps  the  happiest.  The  opportunity  had  been 
quite  unlooked  for,  and  the  change  in  his  position 
from  a  merely  clever  and  somewhat  erratic  member 
of  Parliament  to  one  of  the  most  prominent  men  in 
England,  was  extraordinarily  rapid.  There  were  the 
special  sweets  of  confident  anticipation.  He  was  also 
comparatively  young  and  capable  of  keen  feeling. 
There  were  still  living  and  in  constant  intercourse 
with  him  his  devoted  wife  and  his  sister,  Sarah.  The 
full  sympathy  of  both  of  them  in  the  drama  of  his 
career  was  an  important  ingredient  in  his  cup  of 
happiness.  His  greatest  acts  of  constructive  states- 
manship no  doubt  belong  to  a  later  period.  He  was 
twice  Prime  Minister,  and  in  his  first  tenure  of  that 
office  he  realized  by  the  Reform  Bill  of  1867  one  of 
his  ideals,  namely,  the  attempt  to  enlist  on  the  side 
of  the  Tory  cause  "the  invigorating  energies  of  an 
educated  and  enfranchised  people."  During  his  second 
reign  he  devoted  himself,  as  has  already  been  said,  to 


DISRAELI  43 

the  development  of  the  Imperial  idea  in  his  party. 
He  brought  into  prominence  the  position  of  England 
as  an  Imperial  Power,  and  substantially  increased  her 
influence  on  Continental  politics.  But  before  his  first 
innings  his  sister  Sarah  was  dead  ;  and  before  his 
second  his  wife  had  been  taken  from  him.  He  was 
elderly  in  1867,  old  in  1873.  "  It  has  all  come  too 
late,"  he  said. 

Of  these  later  days  I  shall  not  now  speak  in 
detail,  as  Mr.  Monypenny's  volumes  have  not  told  us 
their  inner  history. 


II 

LORD   CROMER  ON    DISRAELI 

I  referred  in  my  last  essay  to  Lord  Cromer's 
remarkable  study  of  Disraeli,  written  originally  in  the 
Spectator  and  afterwards  published  as  a  volume.  It 
contains  passages  that  are  full  of  insight.  But  it 
includes  a  severe  indictment.  "  Disraeli,"  Lord 
Cromer  writes,  was  a  M  political  adventurer "  who 
"  used  his  genius  to  found  a  political  school  based  on 
extreme  self-seeking  opportunism.  In  this  respect  he 
cannot  be  acquitted  of  the  charge  of  having  contri- 
buted towards  the  degradation  of  English  political 
life."  This  charge,  which  I  cannot  accept  as  just, 
supplies  a  suitable  theme  for  some  further  observations 
on  a  singularly  intricate  character. 

It  has  called  forth  indignant  protests  from 
Disraeli's  admirers.  Indeed,  it  is  not  to  be  won- 
dered at  that  the  generation  which  knew  the  Disraeli 
of  the  'seventies  should  resent  an  account  which 
ranked  the  great  Tory  statesman  of  their  youth  as 
nothing  better  than  an  unprincipled  and  self-seeking 
adventurer.  I  venture  to  think  that  all  the  most 
interesting  passages  in  Lord  Cromer's  analysis  of 
Disraeli's  character  may  stand,  while  yet  one  may 
strongly  join  issue  with  him  on  his  disparaging  con- 
clusion. A  self-seeking  adventurer  and  opportunist  is 
one  who  lacks,  or  at  least  does  not  act  upon,  political 


LORD   CROMER   ON  DISRAELI  45 

convictions,  and  has  no  other  aims  besides  his  own 
personal  advancement.  I  do  not  think  this  can 
possibly  be  said  of  Disraeli  in  the  face  of  obvious 
facts.  His  active  mind  was  full  of  views  and  aims 
quite  unconnected  with  his  personal  advancement. 
No  doubt  there  was  an  element  of  opportunism  in  his 
early  career,  and  he  had  a  passion  for  success.  He 
conceived  a  determination  which  hardly  any  one  in  his 
position  would  have  ventured  to  conceive,  that  he 
would  rise  to  the  very  top  of  the  political  ladder  ;  and 
only  an  indomitable  pluck  which  was  not  over  sensitive 
to  petty  scruples  could  have  enabled  him  to  realize 
that  ambition.  For  him  to  get  into  Parliament  at  all 
was  difficult.  He  had  to  look  for  help  where  he  could 
get  it.  And,  agreeing  with  neither  party,  he  did  avail 
himself  of  assistance  from  members  of  both.  Had 
Disraeli  at  the  outset  relied  for  success  on  nothing  but 
the  scrupulous  advocacy  of  political  ideals,  he  could 
never  have  become  a  great  statesman  at  all.  He 
would  not  have  had  the  chance,  for  he  would  never 
have  got  to  the  front.1  Lord  Cromer  seems  to  me 
to  ignore  this.  He  deals  with  Disraeli's  earlier 
career  as  though  it  were  exclusively  an  index,  and 
a  complete  index,  to  his  inspiring  motives  and  ideals, 
quite  apart  from  his  sheer  necessities.  It  might 
be   so   in   the   case  of  one  who  began  political  life 

1  That  Disraeli's  cleverness  helped  him  to  the  front  is  not  inconsistent 
with  the  fact  that  it  created  a  certain  mistrust  of  him  in  his  party  later 
on,  and  was  so  far  detrimental  rather  than  helpful  to  his  influence  when 
he  became  leader.  Simple  and  straightforward  minds  could  not  quite 
understand  him.  I  say  this  in  reply  to  a  critic  who  lays  stress  on  this 
latter  fact  as  inconsistent  with  what  I  say  in  the  text.  I  do  not  see  the 
inconsistency.  The  qualities  which  bring  an  obscure  man  to  the  front — 
the  clever  use  of  opportunity  and  insistent  pushing — are  not  necessarily 
those  which  inspire  complete  confidence  when  he  has  arrived. 


46  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

with  such  advantages  as  William  Pitt,  for  whom  an 
independent  position  was  secure  from  the  first.  Pitt 
was  free  to  concentrate  his  energies  on  public  objects 
with  little  or  no  arriere  pensie  to  personal  advance- 
ment. With  Disraeli  it  was  otherwise.  He  had  to 
push  to  the  front  rank.  It  was  only  after  he  had  got 
there  that  he  could  adequately  display  his  larger  aims 
as  a  statesman. 

But  even  in  his  early  career  Disraeli  was  not 
opportunist  at  the  cost  of  being  false  to  his  convictions. 
He  never  for  a  moment  pretended  to  endorse  the 
views  of  the  leaders  of  the  Whig  party,  though  he 
had  friends  in  the  rank  and  file.  On  the  contrary, 
he  consistently  denounced  them.  His  vehement 
personal  attacks  on  Peel  may  have  been  largely 
prompted  by  opportunist  motives.  Grant  Duff  relates 
in  his  Diary  that  Disraeli  excused  his  action  to  Peel's 
daughter  on  that  very  ground.  "It  was  a  splendid 
opportunity  for  a  young  man,"  he  said.  And  he 
added :  "  Did  you  ever  see  a  little  dog  bark  at  a 
big  dog  ?  I  was  that  little  dog."  But  while  these 
personal  assaults  on  Peel  brought  him  to  the  front, 
they  involved  no  unfaithfulness  to  conviction.  Disraeli 
adhered  consistently  to  Peel's  earlier  policy  (in  which 
he  had  concurred)  of  moderate  Protection,  of  a  modi- 
fication of  the  Corn  Laws  as  opposed  to  their  repeal. 
It  was  Peel  who  changed,  and  not  Disraeli.  Thus 
Disraeli  cannot  be  justly  accused  of  any  desertion  of 
political  principles.  It  can  only  be  said  that  he  advo- 
cated what  were  his  genuine  views  in  such  a  manner 
as  to  tell  for  his  own  advancement.  To  depict  him 
as  merely  an  opportunist  is,  indeed,  to  miss  the  very 
essence  of  his  genius.  The  thorough-going  oppor- 
tunist is  a  trimmer.     He  is  the  antithesis  to  the  man 


LORD   CROMER  ON  DISRAELI  47 

of  ideas.  And  the  author  of  Coningsby  and  Sibyl  was 
pre-eminently  a  man  of  ideas.  This,  indeed,  Lord 
Cromer  elsewhere  in  his  essay  to  some  extent  recog- 
nizes. But  he  nowhere  recognizes  that  it  was  to  the 
ideas  and  not  to  opportunist  methods  that  Disraeli 
mainly  looked  for  achieving  success.  I  cited  in  my 
first  essay  his  remark  in  Coningsby  that  the  second- 
rate  man  succeeds  by  intrigue,  the  first-rate  man  by 
great  talents  and  great  truths.  Disraeli  regarded 
himself  as  a  first-rate  man,  and  he  meant  to  tread  the 
first-rate  man's  path  to  success. 

Lord  Cromer  makes  the  same  mistake  as  do  those 
who  accuse  indiscriminately  of  selfishness  all  who  seek 
after  their  own  happiness.  Ambition,  like  the  desire 
for  happiness,  is  natural  to  man.  It  is  hard  to  get 
away  from  either  :  but  we  may  seek  happiness  either 
by  satisfying  our  higher  nature  which  prompts  us  to 
beneficence,  or  by  purely  selfish  pleasure.  And  a 
statesman  may  gratify  ambition  for  success  by  striving 
merely  to  be  prominent,  or  to  be  really  great.  Disraeli 
certainly  aimed  at  the  latter.  And  no  mere  opportu- 
nist can  become  a  great  leader  of  men.  Lord  Cromer 
does  not  exaggerate  the  degree  of  Disraeli's  ambition, 
but  he  mistakes  its  quality. 

An  element  of  opportunism  is  found  in  every 
practical  statesman.  But  it  was  not  more  conspicuous 
in  Disraeli, — in  his  later  life  at  all  events — than  it  was, 
for  example,  in  Palmerston.  In  the  great  measures 
of  his  first  premiership — the  extension  of  the  fran- 
chise and  the  removal  of  Jewish  disabilities — his 
action  was  the  reverse  of  opportunist  in  the  ordinary 
sense.  He  opposed  rather  than  fell  in  with  the  current 
of  traditional  opinion  in  the  Tory  party,  and  was 
actuated  by  his  own  long-standing  ideals. 


48  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

Then,  again,  his  foreign  policy,  during  his  second 
tenure  of  highest  office,  lifted  English  statesmanship 
once  again,  as  Palmerston  had  lifted  it,  above  the  some- 
what parochial  standpoint  of  Mr.  Gladstone  and  of  the 
Manchester  school.  Doubtless  there  were  startling 
actions  which  were  denounced  by  critics  as  theatrical. 
But  they  were  often  justified  by  the  event.  One  of 
his  severest  critics — Grant  Duff — who  had  laughed  at 
Disraeli's  rather  sensational  purchase  of  the  Suez 
Canal  shares,  which  secured  for  England  the  key  to 
India,  had  the  candour  to  admit  in  later  years  that 
it  had  proved  an  immense  financial  success.1  When 
our  ships  appeared  suddenly  at  the  Dardanelles  in 
1877,  and  when  the  Indian  troops  were  sent  to  Malta, 
people  talked  of  a  coup  de  thidtre,  but  the  demonstra- 
tion had  its  effect  on  the  Russians.2  The  treaty  of 
St.  Stefano  and  the  Berlin  Congress  were  largely  due 
to  what  Russia  took  to  be  signs  that  England  was  in 
earnest  and  prepared  to  act. 

Lord  Cromer's  criticism  on  Disraeli's  policy  of 
democratic  Toryism,  while  undoubtedly  it  has  some 
force,  nevertheless  fails  to  face  the  crux  of  the  question 
as  a  practical  one,  namely,  that  the  alternative  policy 
of  making  the  Tory  party  dependent  on  the  middle 
classes  was,  in  the  'fifties  and  'sixties,  impossible. 
The  alliance  between  the  bulk  of  the  middle  classes 
and  the  Liberals  was  very  closely  cemented.  The 
wage-earning  class  was,  so  to  say,  much  more  open  to 
an  offer  from  the  Tories.  This  was  decisive  for  a 
practical  statesman,    though    I   admit   that  a   special 

1  Out  0/  the  Past,  by  Sir  M.  E.  Grant  Duff  (Murray),  vol.  ii.  p.  207. 

2  The  general  impression  on  the  Continent  had  been  that  India  would 
be  a  source  of  embarrassment  in  case  of  war.  But  the  arrival  of  Indian 
troops  in  Malta  set  free  our  own  troops  for  active  service  elsewhere. 


LORD   CROMER   ON  DISRAELI  49 

alliance  with  the  shopkeeping  classes  would  in  any 
case  have  been  very  repugnant  to  Disraeli's  pre- 
judices. There  is,  no  doubt,  some  truth  in  Lord 
Cromer's  contention  that  the  middle  class,  which  has 
a  certain  stake  in  the  country,  would  form  a  more 
reliable  support  for  Conservatism  than  the  wage-earn- 
ing class.  That  class  is  the  demagogue's  natural 
prey.  It  has  less  to  lose  by  revolution,  and  has 
less  knowledge  and  critical  power  wherewith  to 
appraise  the  real  value  of  a  specious  promise. 
Radicals  can  always  go  "one  better"  than  Conser- 
vatives in  the  demagogue's  bids  for  support.  But  in 
the  'fifties  and  'sixties  the  alliance  between  the  middle 
class  and  the  Whigs  was  too  firm  to  be  broken. 

Mr.  Monypenny's  remarks  on  Disraeli's  consist- 
ency (in  the  first  volume  of  his  biography)  are,  I 
think,  very  just.  So  far  as  ideas  go,  Disraeli  was 
from  first  to  last  consistent.  His  faith  in  democracy, 
his  reverence  for  traditional  institutions,  his  dislike  of 
the  Whig  oligarchy,  his  desire  to  secure  a  modification 
of  the  Corn  Laws,  but  without  the  sacrifice  of 
agricultural  interests,  his  sympathy  with  the  people 
before  such  sympathies  had  become  fashionable — all 
these  are  visible  in  Disraeli's  public  utterances  from 
first  to  last.  He  had  not,  as  Mr.  Monypenny  happily 
expresses  it,  "the  self-conscious  consistency  of  the 
moral  precisian  "  ;  but  certain  cardinal  ideas  possessed 
him,  and  possessed  him  consistently.  Why  then  was 
he  accused  of  inconsistency  ?  Because  the  world  is 
apt  to  measure  consistency  in  a  statesman  rather  by 
the  etiquette  of  party  allegiance  which  it  understands 
than  by  ideas  which  it  does  not  understand.  Yet,  as 
Mr.  Monypenny  says,  "A  man  with  a  perfectly 
consistent  party  record   will  be  more  likely   to   win 

E 


So  MEN   AND  MATTERS 

distinction  as  a  good  partisan  than  as  a  great  states- 
man. If  we  are  to  measure  consistency  by  ideas," 
Mr.  Monypenny  continues,  "  Disraeli  is  the  most  con- 
sistent [among  his  contemporaries],  and  yet  more  than 
any  of  the  others  he  was  to  suffer  throughout  his 
career  from  the  reputation  of  political  time-server  and 
adventurer  acquired  in  these  early  and  errant  years. 
In  one  sense  this  reputation  was  wholly  unjust ;  in 
another  it  had  not  been  unprovoked,  nor,  indeed, 
wholly  undeserved.  In  his  guiding  principles  and 
ideas  he  had  changed  far  less  than  most  of  his  judges 
and  critics,  but  the  world,  which  looks  only  to  exter- 
nals, saw  that  he  had  been  in  communication,  if  not 
in  co-operation,  with  men  at  the  opposite  poles  of 
politics,  and  drew  its  conclusions  accordingly.  He 
had  been  too  eager  in  his  desire  for  tangible  and 
immediate  success,  too  reckless  in  his  disregard  for 
the  conventions  of  political  life;  and  he  had  thus 
aroused  in  many  a  distrust  which  he  was  never  wholly 
to  allay." x 

At  the  same  time,  while  I  admit  Mr.  Monypenny's 
plea  that  Disraeli  was  essentially  consistent,  it  cannot 
be  denied  that  his  irrepressible  habit  of  banter  some- 
times suggested  a  lower  standard  of  political  consist- 
ency than  he  really  acted  on.  For  example,  the 
racy  passage  on  party  allegiance  in  his  now  forgotten 
novel,  The  Young  Duke,  which  was  avowedly  auto- 
biographical, must  have  confirmed  the  solemn  critics 
in  their  estimate  of  him  as  a  political  farceur. 

Am  I  a  Whig  or  a  Tory  ?  I  forget.  As  for  the  Tories, 
I  admire  antiquity,  particularly  a  ruin  ;  even  the  relics  of  the 
Temple  of  Intolerance  have  a  charm.     I  think  I  am  a  Tory. 

1  Life  of  Disraeli,  I.  p.  277. 


LORD  CROMER   ON  DISRAELI  51 

But  then  the  Whigs  give  such  good  dinners,  and  are  the  most 
amusing.  I  think  I  am  a  Whig.  But  then  the  Tories  are  so 
moral,  and  morality  is  my  forte  ;  I  must  be  a  Tory.  But  the 
Whigs  dress  so  much  better ;  and  an  ill-dressed  party,  like  an 
ill-dressed  man,  must  be  wrong.  Yes  !  I  am  a  decided 
Whig. 

And  yet — I  feel  like  Garrick  between  Tragedy  and 
Comedy. 

I  think  I  will  be  a  Whig  and  Tory  alternate  nights,  and 
then  both  will  be  pleased  ;  or  I  have  no  objection,  according 
to  the  fashion  of  the  day,  to  take  place  under  a  Tory  ministry, 
provided  I  may  vote  against  them. 

Disraeli's  political  seriousness  and  earnestness  is, 
I  think,  the  true  problem,  not  his  sincerity.  Sincerity 
is  sometimes  understood  to  mean  frankness.  If  so, 
he  was  the  most  sincere  of  politicians.  It  is  his  own 
naked  avowals  that  fame  was  his  chief  object  that  have 
put  weapons  into  Lord  Cromer's  hands.  Political 
sincerity  may  again  mean  consistency.  If  so,  Disraeli 
has  a  strong  case — stronger  than  that  of  his  two  chief 
opponents — Peel  and  Gladstone — each  of  whom  can 
be  charged  with  at  least  two  famous  reversals  of  their 
own  policy.  But  sincerity  may  also  mean  depth  and 
seriousness.  How  deeply  and  how  seriously  do 
public  objects,  which  we  genuinely  desire,  move  us  ? 
How  deep  is  their  force  as  motives  ?  Johnson  denied 
depth  of  sincerity  to  the  butcher  who  descanted  on 
patriotism.  "When,"  he  remarked,  "a  butcher  says 
his  heart  bleeds  for  his  country,  he  has,  in  fact,  no 
uneasy  feeling."  How  far  were  Disraeli's  real  con- 
victions deeply  serious  ?  How  far  did  a  certain 
underlying  cynicism  accompany  all  his  aspirations  ? 
Here  we  have  an  interesting  question  which  cannot 
be  answered  without  a  study  of  Disraeli's  very  peculiar 


52  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

mental  temperament.  This  has  been  a  puzzle  to  the 
ordinary  Englishman — largely,  no  doubt,  because  of 
the  Oriental  element  in  it  on  which  Lord  Cromer 
dwells.  The  aims  and  motives  of  the  Oriental  puzzle 
us  much  as  a  cat  puzzles  us.  We  know  when  a  dog 
is  pleased  and  what  he  wants ;  but  the  emotions  of  a 
cat  are  often  shrouded  in  mystery  for  us.  Indeed, 
one  of  our  poets  once  compared  a  cat  to  the 
mysterious  Oriental,  a  bustling  collie  dog  to  the 
straightforward  Western.  But  we  have,  moreover, 
to  consider  in  Disraeli  not  a  type — for  he  had  many 
qualities  distinctly  English  (his  courage  and  pertinacity 
for  example) — but  a  very  unique  individual. 

The  twelfth  Duke  of  Somerset — Disraeli's  old 
friend  long  before  he  entered  the  House  of  Commons 
— has  left  it  on  record  that  he  once  asked  Disraeli  in 
early  years  what  he  considered  the  most  desirable  life. 
Disraeli  replied :  "  A  continued  grand  procession  from 
manhood  to  the  tomb."1  Grant  Duff  records  in  his 
Diaries  how,  at  the  great  party  given  to  open  the 
Foreign  Office  when  Disraeli  was  Prime  Minister  in 
the  'seventies,  after  handing  the  Princess  of  Wales 
to  her  carriage,  he  came  back  and  saw,  waiting  in 
the  hall,  the  Duchess  of  Somerset,  who  had  been 
so  kind  to  him  in  the  days  of  his  struggling 
youth.  The  whole  drama  of  life  seemed  to  flash 
upon  him  suddenly.  He  turned  to  her  and  said  : 
"  Isn't  it  all  a  play  ? "  Life  was  to  Disroeli  always 
something  of  a  drama  in  which  he  meant  to  play  a 
prominent  part — a  pictorial  procession  of  great  men, 
among  whom  he  meant  to  be  conspicuous.  He 
had  a  touch  of  megalomania,  and  a  touch  of  the 
theatrical.  Without  for  a  moment  saying  that  his 
1  Disraeli^  by  W.  Meynell  (Hutchinson),  p.  185. 


LORD  CROMER   ON  DISRAELI  53 

conception  of  life  was  immoral,  I  think  it  is  true 
to  say  that  it  was  somewhat  non-moral.  His 
immediate  aims  grew  far  larger  and  less  personal 
after  he  had  attained  success ;  he  concentrated  on 
important  public  objects  and  conceived  a  great  policy 
of  Imperialism  ;  but  his  dramatic  way  of  viewing  life 
never  left  him.  It  was  an  unalterable  trait  in  his 
mental  character. 

We  see  it  plainly  in  the  graphic  accounts  of  his 
doings  and  triumphs  contained  in  his  early  letters  to 
his  friends.  As  quite  a  lad  he  was  sent  to  Abbotsford 
to  negotiate  on  Murray's  behalf  with  Lockhart  and 
Sir  Walter  Scott  concerning  the  founding  of  a  news- 
paper— the  Representative.  He  writes  from  thence 
with  all  the  airs  of  an  ambassador.  The  proposed 
journal  is  to  be  a  great  international  power,  a  "  mighty 
engine."  Its  writers  are  to  include  the  greatest  men 
of  the  day,  foreigners  as  well  as  Englishmen.  The 
delicate  negotiations  with  Abbotsford  are  shrouded  in 
mystery.  The  eminent  personages  concerned  are 
alluded  to,  not  by  their  names,  but  by  a  prearranged 
code.  Murray  is  warned  to  stay  in  London,  as  the 
chief  actors  may  find  it  the  best  diplomacy  to  come 
up  quite  suddenly.  His  friends,  amused  at  his  pose, 
dubbed  him  "the  young  plenipotentiary." 

The  letters  to  his  sister  Sarah,  during  his  foreign 
tour  of  1830,  are,  again,  intensely  dramatic.  They 
evince  the  fascination  which  the  mere  drama  of  life, 
with  its  startling  and  picturesque  incidents,  had  for 
him.  To  play  a  conspicuous  part  in  this  drama  was  a 
passion  so  overwhelming  that  at  first  he  thirsted  even 
for  notoriety  in  default  of  fame  of  higher  quality. 
We  have  often  heard  of  Disraeli's  extravagant  dress 
in  his  early  years.     Perhaps  few  people  before  Mr. 


54  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

Monypenny's  volumes  appeared  had  realized  quite  how 
far  it  went,  or  appreciated  his  love  of  making  even  a 
momentary  sensation  by  it  and  being  stared  at.  I 
dwell  on  this  fact,  as  I  think  it  is  really  indicative  of 
a  marked  and  permanent  feature  in  his  character 
which  had  serious  consequences.  When  he  went  for 
a  foreign  tour  with  his  friend  Meredith  in  1830,  the 
account  of  his  performances  in  this  line  would  be 
almost  incredible,  but  for  unquestionably  authentic 
records.  He  appeared  to  change  one  fantastic  dress 
for  another  almost  every  day.  Meredith  thus  des- 
cribes his  appearance  when  Disraeli  came  to  see  him 
some  time  before  they  started  on  their  travels :  "He 
came  up  Regent  Street  when  it  was  crowded,  in  his 
blue  surtout,  a  pair  of  military  light  blue  trousers, 
black  stockings  with  red  stripes,  and  shoes !  •  The 
people,'  he  said,  '  quite  made  way  for  me  as  I  passed. 
It  was  like  the  opening  of  the  Red  Sea,  which  I  now 
perfectly  believe  from  experience.  Even  well-dressed 
people  stopped  to  look  at  me.'  I  should  think  so  ! " 
adds  Meredith. 

On  his  first  meeting  a  few  days  later  with  Lytton 
Bulwer  at  dinner  in  Hertford  Street,  his  appearance 
was  thus  described  by  his  host:  "He  wore  green 
velvet  trousers,  a  canary-coloured  waistcoat,  low 
shoes,  silver  buckles,  lace  at  his  wrists,  and  his  hair 
in  ringlets." 

In  the  course  of  his  wanderings  he  broke  out  into 
fresh  extravagances.  He  spent  part  of  his  time  at 
Malta  in  company  with  Mr.  James  Clay — afterwards  a 
well-known  member  of  Parliament.  One  week  they 
went  yachting,  and  Disraeli  donned  a  fresh  costume 
to  suit  the  occasion,  which  he  thus  describes  to  his 
brother : 


LORD  CROMER  ON  DISRAELI  55 

1  I  have  spent  very  agreeable  hours  in  a  yacht  which  Clay 
has  hired,  and  in  which  he  intends  to  turn  pirate.  The 
original  plan  was  to  have  taken  it  together,  but  Meredith  was 
averse  to  this,  and  we  have  become  his  passengers  at  a  fair 
rate,  and  he  drops  us  whenever  and  wherever  we  like.  You 
should  see  me  in  the  costume  of  a  Greek  pirate.  A  blood- 
red  shirt,  with  silver  studs  as  big  as  shillings,  an  immense 
scarf  for  girdle,  full  of  pistols  and  daggers,  red  cap,  red 
slippers,  broad  blue-striped  jacket  and  trousers. 

His  overweening  self-confidence  made  him  think 
his  extravagance  impressive  and  thoroughly  welcome. 
He  assumed  the  languor  of  an  exquisite,  and  gave 
himself  the  superior  airs  of  an  intellectualist  who 
looked  down  on  the  ordinary  sports  of  youth.  He 
writes  as  follows  from  Malta  : 

Here  the  younkers  do  nothing  but  play  rackets,  billiards 
and  cards,  race  and  smoke.  To  govern  men  you  must  either 
excel  them  in  their  accomplishments  or  despise  them.  Clay 
does  the  one  ;  I  do  the  other ;  and  we  are  both  equally 
popular.  Affectation  tells  here  even  better  than  wit.  Yester- 
day at  the  racket  court,  the  ball  entered  and  lightly  struck 
me.  I  took  it  up,  and,  observing  a  young  rifleman,  I  humbly 
requested  him  to  forward  its  passage  into  the  court,  as  I 
really  had  never  thrown  a  ball  in  my  life.  This  incident  has 
been  the  general  subject  of  conversation  at  all  the  messes 
to-day. 

Unfortunately,  Sir  William  Gregory  has  left  an 
account  derived  from  Clay  himself  of  the  impression 
Disraeli  made  on  his  company,  which  tells  a  very 
different  story : 

"When  the  two  got  into  society,"  Sir  William 
writes,  "  Disraeli  made  himself  so  hateful  to  the 
officers'  mess  that,  while  they  welcomed  Clay,  they 
ceased  to  invite  ■  that  damned  bumptious  Jew  boy.'  " 


56  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

It  seems  that  when  he  did  dine  with  the  officers 
he  appeared  in  Andalusian  dress,  M  in  his  majo 
jacket,"  writes  Meredith,  "white  trousers,  and  a  sash 
of  all  the  colours  in  the  rainbow.  In  this  wonderful 
costume  he  [also]  paraded  all  round  Valetta,  followed 
by  one  half  of  the  population  of  the  place,  and,  as  he 
said,  putting  a  complete  stop  to  all  business." 

When  he  gets  to  Yanina  he  is  intoxicated  with 
the  general  splendour  and  colour  of  the  costumes  and 
the  Oriental  air  of  the  place,  and  is  prompted  to  don 
an  entirely  fresh  costume  a  la  Turque.  It  is  all 
described  by  him  in  a  letter  to  Benjamin  Austen  : 

I  can  give  you  no  idea  in  a  letter  of  all  the  Pashas,  and 
all  the  Silictars,  and  all  the  Agas  that  I  have  visited  and  that 
have  visited  me  ;  all  the  pipes  I  smoked,  all  the  coffee  I 
sipped,  all  the  sweetmeats  I  devoured.  .  .  .  For  a  week  I  was 
in  a  scene  equal  to  anything  in  the  Arabian  Nights — such 
processions,  such  dresses,  such  corteges  of  horsemen,  such 
caravans  of  camels.  Then  the  delight  of  being  made  much 
of  by  a  man  who  was  daily  decapitating  half  the  Province. 
Every  morning  we  paid  visits,  attended  reviews,  and  crammed 
ourselves  with  sweetmeats ;  every  evening  dancers  and  singers 
were  sent  to  our  quarters  by  the  Vizier  or  some  Pasha.  .  .  . 

I  am  quite  a  Turk,  wear  a  turban,  smoke  a  pipe  six  feet 
long,  and  squat  on  a  divan.  Mehemet  Pasha  told  me  that 
he  did  not  think  I  was  an  Englishman  because  I  walked  so 
slow :  in  fact,  I  find  the  habits  of  this  calm  and  luxurious 
people  entirely  agree  with  my  own  preconceived  opinions  of 
propriety  and  enjoyment,  and  I  detest  the  Greeks  more  than 
ever.  You  have  no  idea  of  the  rich  and  various  costume  of 
the  Levant.  When  I  was  presented  to  the  Grand  Vizier  I 
made  up  such  a  costume  from  my  heterogeneous  wardrobe 
that  the  Turks,  who  are  mad  on  the  subject  of  dress,  were 
utterly  astounded.  .  .  . 

Further   details   of    the    costume   are    given    by 


LORD   CROMER   ON  DISRAELI  57 

Meredith  :  "Figure  to  yourself,"  he  writes  to  a  friend, 
11  a  shirt  entirely  red,  with  silver  studs  as  large  as 
sixpences,  green  pantaloons  with  a  velvet  stripe  down 
the  sides,  and  a  silk  Albanian  shawl  with  a  long  fringe 
of  divers  colours  round  his  waist,  red  Turkish  slippers, 
and,  to  complete  all,  his  Spanish  majo  jacket  covered 
with  embroidery  and  ribbons."  "  Ouesto  vestito 
Inglese  o  di  fantasia? "  asked  a  little  Greek  physician 
who  had  passed  a  year  at  Pisa  in  his  youth.  "  Inglese 
e  fantastico,"  was  Disraeli's  oracular  reply. 

Throughout  his  travels  we  see  both  his  keen  sense 
of  the  dramatic  and  his  love  of  splendour.  This  could 
easily  be  illustrated  at  great  length. 

When  he  is  in  Spain  he  writes  from  Cadiz  :  "  The 
white  houses  and  the  green  jalousies  sparkle  in  the 
sun.  Figaro  is  in  every  street,  Rosina  in  every 
balcony."  From  a  score  of  letters  in  the  same  strain 
I  select  a  quotation  from  one  to  his  mother,  written 
from  Granada  : 

A  Spanish  lady  with  her  fan  might  shame  the  tactics  of 
a  troop  of  horse.  Now  she  unfurls  it  with  the  slow  pomp 
and  conscious  elegance  of  a  peacock.  Now  she  flutters  it 
with  all  the  languor  of  a  listless  beauty,  now  with  all  the  live- 
liness of  a  vivacious  one.  Now,  in  the  midst  of  a  very  tor- 
nado, she  closes  it  with  a  whir  which  makes  you  start,  pop ! 
In  the  midst  of  your  confusion  Dolores  taps  you  on  the  elbow; 
you  turn  round  to  listen,  and  Florentina  pokes  you  in  your 
side.  Magical  instrument !  You  know  that  it  speaks  a  par- 
ticular language,  and  gallantry  requires  no  other  mode  to 
express  its  most  subtle  conceits  or  its  most  unreasonable 
demands  than  this  slight,  delicate  organ.  But  remember, 
while  you  read,  that  it  is  not  here,  as  in  England,  confined 
alone  to  your  delightful  sex.  I  also  have  my  fan,  which 
makes  my  cane  extremely  jealous.  If  you  think  I  have 
grown  extraordinarily  effeminate,  learn  that  in  this  scorching 


58  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

clime  the  soldier  will  not  mount  guard  without  one.  Night 
wears  on,  we  sit,  we  take  a  panal,  which  is  as  quick  work  as 
snapdragon,  and  far  more  elegant ;  again  we  stroll.  Midnight 
clears  the  public  walks,  but  few  Spanish  families  retire  till 
two.  A  solitary  bachelor  like  myself  still  wanders,  or  still 
lounges  on  a  bench  in  the  warm  moonlight.  The  last  guitar 
dies  away,  the  cathedral  clock  wakes  up  your  reverie,  you, 
too,  seek  your  couch,  and,  amid  a  gentle,  sweet  flow  of  loveli- 
ness, and  light,  and  music,  and  fresh  air,  thus  dies  a  day  in 
Spain. 

When  he  gets  to  the  East  the  drama  heightens. 
A  touch  of  the  theatrical  comes  out  in  a  phrase  he 
uses  in  a  letter  to  Mrs.  Austen  :  "  All  was  like  life  in 
a. pantomime  or  an  Eastern  tale  of  enchantment." 

Of  course,  he  imagined  himself  as  playing  a  central 
role  in  this  fascinating  drama  of  life,  and  his  methods 
were  marked  by  dramatic  effects.  This  was  apparent 
in  his  later  career,  as  well  as  in  his  earlier  struggle 
for  place.  But  these  effects  did  not  ever  consist  in 
a  mere  skilful  playing  to  the  gallery  with  a  view  to 
winning  applause — the  course  of  a  systematic  oppor- 
tunist. On  the  contrary,  just  as  he  irritated  the 
officers  at  mess,  so  he  later  on  irritated  many  of  his 
constituents  by  his  affectations  and  showy  dress,  and 
eventually  irritated  the  House  of  Commons  in  his  first 
speech  by  his  turgid  and  bombastic  eloquence.  No 
doubt  the  resolute  determination  to  get  on  made  him 
gradually  correct  faults  which  offended  those  on  whom 
his  success  depended.  But  in  the  first  instance  he 
was  acting  in  the  drama  of  life  a  part  suited  to  his  own 
sense  of  what  that  drama  should  be.  And  thus  he 
was  dramatic  in  pursuing  even  his  highest  political 
ideals.  He  was  making  history.  History  was  for 
him  a  scenic  drama,  and  he  cared  only  for  its  stirring 
pages. 


LORD   CROMER   ON  DISRAELI  59 

His  Oriental  love  of  magnificence  never  woke  a 
response  in  his  English  followers.  It  did  not  in  early- 
years  contribute  to  his  personal  popularity — rather 
the  reverse.  But  it  had  a  large  part  in  the  picture  of 
his  own  life  which  satisfied  his  ideal.  Probably  he 
needed  appreciative  sympathy  from  some — and  he 
got  it  from  Bulwer,  from  his  wife,  and,  more  than 
all,  from  his  sister  Sarah,  to  whom  he  was  so 
devoted  and  who  so  entirely  shared  his  own  likes  and 
dislikes.  Sarah  Disraeli  died  before  her  brother 
became  Prime  Minister  in  1867,  and  'pathetic  is  the 
record  by  Sir  Philip  Rose  of  Disraeli's  reply  to  a 
word  said  to  him  on  this  subject.  Rose  lamented  that 
Sarah  had  not  lived  to  see  the  great  day,  and  Disraeli, 
deeply  affected,  could  only  reply  in  a  few  broken 
words:  "Ah!  poor  Sa,  poor  Sa ;  we've  lost  our 
audience,  we've  lost  our  audience  !  " 

Grant  Duff — not  perhaps  a  wholly  sympathetic 
critic,  but  a  faithful  raconteur — used  to  declare  that 
Disraeli  involuntarily  let  out  the  feeling  he  had  that 
he  was  taking  part  in  a  dramatic  representation  by 
referring  to  Her  Majesty's  Government  in  a  speech 
as  "  Her  Majesty's  Company." 

Dramatic  surprises  were,  of  course,  to  the  end  a 
characteristic  feature  in  Disraeli's  policy.  During  the 
few  years  of  his  glory  in  the  'seventies,  a  stern  Whig 
critic  remarked,  "  Lord  Beaconsfield  has  taken  John 
Bull  to  Cremorne.  The  old  fellow  rather  likes  it,  but 
there  will  be  a  morrow  to  the  debauch."  His  sense 
of  the  dramatic  did  not  desert  him  as  the  drama  drew 
to  a  close.  Some  one  asked  him  when  he  got  to  the 
House  of  Lords  how  he  liked  it.  He  replied  :  "  I 
feel  that  I  am  dead,  but  in  the  Elysian  fields."  Lord 
Ronald  Gower  has  given  an  account  of  him  sitting 


60  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

looking  into  the  fire  in  his  last  years,  conjuring  up  the 
picture  of  old  friends  who  were  dead,  and  murmuring  : 
"  Dreams,  dreams,  dreams  !  " 

With  the  frankness  that  characterized  him  through- 
out, he  faced  the  inevitable  end.  As  he  drove  with 
Lord  Salisbury  from  one  polling  booth  to  another 
during  the  election  of  1880,  and  saw  that  a  Liberal 
victory  was  inevitable,  he  remarked,  "  What  a  differ- 
ence age  makes :  to  you,  I  suppose,  all  this  is 
agreeable  excitement,  to  me  it  is  the  end  of  all 
things." 

One  more  word  as  to  Disraeli's  determination  to 
succeed.  Most  people  have  heard  of  his  shouting  out 
to  a  hostile  House  of  Commons  after  his  first  speech, 
"  The  time  will  come  when  you  will  hear  me."  Ten 
years  earlier  he  had  advised  a  friend  to  keep  his 
letters,  as  they  would  some  day  be  worth  ten  guineas 
apiece.  Most  people  have  heard  of  his  telling  Lord 
Melbourne,  after  he  had  been  in  the  House  two  years, 
that  he  meant  to  be  Prime  Minister.  Not  so  many, 
perhaps,  have  heard  that  Lord  Melbourne,  who  had 
treated  the  remark  at  the  time  as  the  vagary  of  an 
eccentric,  lived  to  see  him,  in  1848,  chosen  leader 
of  the  party  in  the  Commons,  and,  on  hearing 
the  news,  exclaimed :  "  By  God !  the  fellow  will  do 
it  yet."  I  desire,  however,  here  to  emphasize  a 
further  point.  He  wanted  not  only  fame,  but  the 
sweets  of  fame.  And  he  wanted  them  while  he 
could  enjoy  them.  He  was  an  epicure  in  his  am- 
bition, though  he  would  toil  for  his  pleasures.  He 
once  said  that  he  must  get  fame  as  a  young  man, 
and  could  not  be  satisfied  with  waiting  for  it  until  old 
age.  Anyhow,  he  pooh-poohed  the  idea  of  posthumous 
fame  being  worth  anything.     When  he  published  the 


LORD   CROMER   ON  DISRAELI  6t 

first  part  of  his  only  epic  poem,  he  introduced  it  to 
the  public  with  these  words  :  "  I  am  not  one  who  finds 
consolation  for  the  neglect  of  my  contemporaries  in 
the  imaginary  plaudits  of  a  more  sympathetic  posterity. 
The  public  will  decide  whether  this  work  is  to  be 
continued  and  completed.  If  it  passes  its  vote  in  the 
negative,  I  shall,  without  a  pang,  hurl  my  lyre  to 
limbo." 

One  of  his  characters  in  Contarini  Fleming  gives 
utterance  to  the  same  sentiment  in  the  following 
words  :  "  A  man  of  great  energies  aspires  that  they 
shall  be  felt  in  his  lifetime ;  that  his  existence  should 
be  rendered  more  intensely  vital  by  the  constant 
consciousness  of  his  multiplied  and  multiplying  power. 
Is  posthumous    famea  substitute  for  all  this  ?" 

The  passion  for  fame  seems  to  have  cost  him  at 
moments  when  he  doubted  of  success  all  the  pain  that 
a  hopeless  love  passion  sometimes  costs — if  we  are  to 
take  as  autobiographical  another  passage  in  the  same 
novel :  "  To  feel  the  strong  necessity  of  fame  .  .  . 
with  no  simultaneous  faith  in  your  own  power  "  causes 
"  despondency  for  which  no  immortality  can  compen- 
sate." 

This  thirst  for  immediate  results,  this  determination 
that  the  excitement  of  political  fame  should  come  at 
once,  was,  I  think,  illustrative  of  his  view  of  life  as  a 
drama  and  no  more.  It  meant  a  certain  want  of  deep 
faith,  and  consequently  of  the  deepest  seriousness. 
There  was  a  touch  of  scepticism  and  irony  underlying 
his  fascination  in  the  drama.  Yet  his  fascinated 
interest  in  it  all  contributed  to  the  picturesqueness 
and  the  attractiveness  of  his  own  life.  Of  this  I  shall 
say  more  directly. 

One  quality  he  possessed  which  is  often  lacking  in 


62  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

Englishmen — extreme  frankness.  Personal  ambition 
was  openly  proclaimed  by  him — in  words  quoted 
in  my  last  essay — as  the  ruling  motive  of  his  life. 
This  out-spokenness  was  opposed  to  English  virtues 
and  to  English  vices  alike.  Most  Englishmen, 
while  they  are  prepared  to  respect  avowed  am- 
bition, if  it  is  an  ambition  to  do  great  things  for  one's 
country  or  for  the  world,  are  not  prepared  to  respect 
what  seems  to  be  mere  self-seeking,  still  less  its 
open  avowal.  But  again,  to  this  high  standard 
among  Englishmen,  often  corresponds  what  may  fairly 
be  called  a  vice — a  touch,  at  all  events,  of  hypocrisy. 
A  Frenchman  once  defended  it  by  saying,  "  L'hypo- 
crisie  est  l'hommage  que  la  vice  rend  a  la  vertu." 
Many  Englishmen,  whose  ruling  passion  is  personal 
ambition  in  the  same  sense  as  it  was  with  Disraeli, 
profess  to  be  actuated  rather  by  public-spirited  motives 
which  in  reality  have  no  effect  on  them  at  all.  Even 
to  themselves  they  will  not  own  the  truth  of  which 
they  are  ashamed  as  Disraeli  did  without  shame.  Mr. 
Snodgrass  protested  :  "  It  was  not  the  wine,  it  was  the 
salmon."  Disraeli  was  destitute  both  of  the  English 
scruple,  and  of  its  corresponding  vice. 

In  all  this  the  fates  provided  him  with  a  most 
effective  foil  in  the  person  of  his  famous  antagonist 
— Mr.  Gladstone.  A  great  friend  of  Gladstone's 
once  said  to  me  when  I  had  been  deprecating  in  con- 
versation with  the  great  man  a  certain  want  of  ambi- 
tion in  a  character  under  discussion  :  "You  must  not 
say  that  to  him  ;  he  thinks  all  ambition  wrong."  This 
was  certainly  the  antithesis  to  Disraeli's  frank  avowals. 
If  Disraeli  often  had  the  mannerism  of  his  cynical 
indifference,  Gladstone  had  to  an  intense  degree  the 
mannerism  of   his   earnestness.     And  it  led   hostile 


LORD   CROMER   ON  DISRAELI  63 

critics  to  charge  him  with  a  lack  of  the  deepest  sincerity 
on  precisely  the  opposite  grounds  from  those  on  which 
Disraeli's  sincerity  was  impugned.  Mr.  Monypenny 
has,  as  I  have  said,  shown  conclusively  that  Disraeli, 
in  spite  of  untoward  appearances  was,  nevertheless, 
from  first  to  last  consistent  in  his  political  views.  It 
is  difficult  to  maintain  the  same  in  respect  of  the  man 
who  began  life,  in  Macaulay's  phrase,  as  the  "  rising 
hope  of  the  stern,  unbending  Tories,"  and  ended  it 
an  extreme  Radical,  as  Radicalism  was  conceived 
in  the  'eighties.  Consistency  is  again  not  the  obvious 
characteristic  of  the  man  who  in  1882  was  zealous 
for  coercion  in  Ireland,  and  in  1885  an  enthusiastic 
advocate  of  Home  Rule.  One  who  greatly  admired 
Gladstone — the  late  Mr.  Aubrey  de  Vere — was  so  im- 
pressed by  the  unexpected  changes  in  his  policy  that 
he  compared  his  proceedings  to  the  knight's  moves  at 
chess. 

It  is  not  to  my  purpose  to  go  further  into  the 
causes  of  Mr.  Gladstone's  political  variations.  Bis- 
marck, I  believe,  held  that  his  extraordinary  fertility 
of  speech  was  responsible  for  them,  as  it  enabled  him 
to  find  the  best  reasons  for  doing  what  party  motives 
really  prompted.  **  His  eloquence  is  his  bane," 
Bismarck  is  said  to  have  remarked,  "  not  so  much 
because  he  can  persuade  others  of  a  bad  case,  but 
because  he  persuades  himself."  Be  this  as  it  may, 
Gladstone's  intense  mannerism  of  conscientiousness 
was  in  marked  contrast  to  Disraeli's  mannerism  of 
cynical  indifference.  And  his  critics  taxed  him  with 
talking  too  much  of  an  inflexible  conscience  which 
proved  so  plastic,  while  Disraeli's  critics  accused 
him  of  an  unscrupulousness  which  was  naked  and 
unashamed. 


64  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

A  friend  of  mine  once  told  me  that  he  had  heard 
Gladstone's  character  discussed  in  Carlyle's  presence, 
and  some  one  asked  Carlyle  :  "  Do  you  think  he  really 
has  a  conscience  ?  "  Carlyle  reflected,  and  then  replied  : 
"  I  think  he  has  a  conscience,  but  it  is  a  very  peculiar 
conscience.  It  is  a  conscience  which  moves  in  turn 
to  every  point  of  the  compass.  It  is  what  I  call 
a  rotatory  conscience."  Labouchere,  who  regarded 
Gladstone  as  an  out-and-out  opportunist,  in  spite  of 
his  protestations  of  profound  conscientiousness,  is 
reported  to  have  said  :  "  I  don't  mind  Mr.  Gladstone 
playing  with  three  aces  up  his  sleeve  ;  but  I  do  object 
to  his  trying  to  persuade  us  that  Almighty  God  put 
them  there."  That  sayer  of  good  things — Dr.  Magee, 
Archbishop  of  York — was  once  listening  to  a  conver- 
sation on  Gladstone's  sudden  change  in  respect  of 
Home  Rule  which  some  one  described  as  Gladstone's 
"method  of  dealing  with  the  Irish  question."  "No, 
no,"  interpolated  Magee,  "  not  dealing — shuffling!" 

Mr.  Gladstone's  earnestness  in  conversation,  his 
thirst  for  information,  his  absence  of  pretension,  had 
their  own  attractiveness,  for  all  that  might  be  said  of 
his  instability.  And  I  think,  too,  that  both  Disraeli's 
rather  cynical  frankness  and  his  love  of  the  pictorial 
and  dramatic  had  a  very  attractive  side.  Determined 
though  he  was  to  make  his  mark,  he  had  little  or  no 
egotism.  "  He  seldom  talked  of  himself,"  is  the  testi- 
mony of  one  who  saw  him  often  in  later  years.  His 
mind  was  objective,  and  not  at  all  introspective.  He 
looked  at  himself  with  profound  interest,  but  from 
outside.  There  was  a  certain  simplicity  in  him,  and 
some  strong  and  lovable  feelings  shine  forth  in  him 
clear  as  crystal,  as,  for  example,  his  home  affections. 
These  are  conspicuous  in  his  love  for  his  wife,  and  for 


LORD  CROMER   ON  DISRAELI  65 

his  sister  Sarah,  notwithstanding  occasional  histrionic 
expressions  in  his  correspondence  with  the  former. 
Queen  Victoria,  an  excellent  judge  of  men,  was 
fascinated  by  him,  and  the  following  graphic  word- 
picture  of  their  relations,  published  in  the  Quarterly 
Review  after  her  death,  is  worth  citing  : 

He  was  never  in  the  least  shy  ;  he  did  not  trouble  to 
insinuate  ;  he  said  what  he  meant  in  terms  the  most  surprising, 
the  most  unconventional ;  and  the  Queen  thought  that  she 
had  never  in  her  life  seen  so  amusing  a  person:  He  gratified 
her  by  his  bold  assumptions  of  her  knowledge,  she  excused 
his  florid  adulation  on  the  ground  that  it  was  "  Oriental,"  and 
she  was  pleased  with  the  audacious  way  in  which  he  broke 
through  the  ice  that  surrounded  her.  He  would  ask  across 
the  dinner-table,  "  Madam,  did  Lord  Melbourne  ever  tell  your 
Majesty  that  you  were  not  to  do  this  or  that  ? "  and  the 
Queen  would  take  it  as  the  best  of  jokes.  Those  who  were 
present  at  dinner  when  Disraeli  suddenly  proposed  the 
Queen's  health  as  Empress  of  India,  with  a  little  speech  as 
flowery  as  the  oration  of  a  maharajah,  used  to  describe  the 
pretty  smiling  bow,  half  a  curtsey,  which  the  Queen  made 
him  as  he  sat  down.  She  loved  the  East,  with  all  its 
pageantry,  and  all  its  trappings,  and  she  accepted  Disraeli  as 
a  picturesque  image  of  it  It  is  still  remembered  how  much 
more  she  used  to  smile  in  conversation  with  him  than  she  did 
with  any  other  of  her  Ministers. 

Truly  dramatic  is  the  story  of  Disraeli's  friendship 
with  Mrs.  Brydges  Willyams,  a  Spanish  Jewess  of  the 
da  Costa  family,  which  belongs  to  a  period  subse- 
quent to  that  dealt  with  by  Mr.  Monypenny.  Mrs. 
Willyams  conceived  an  enthusiastic  admiration  for  him 
and  entreated  him  to  meet  her.  Her  pertinacity 
eventually  won  the  day,  and  he  kept  tryst  with  her  as 
she  asked  at  the  fountain  in  the  Crystal  Palace.  The 
meeting  ended  in  a  friendship.     She  was  rich.     She 

F 


66  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

was  determined  to  help  his  career  substantially.  She 
left  him  all  her  fortune  when  she  died.  She  devoted 
herself  to  him  as  long  as  she  lived.  I  will  quote  two 
letters  to  Mrs.  Willyams  of  the  year  1862,  each  of 
which  is  in  Disraeli's  flowery  and  imaginative  manner  : 

I  am  quite  myself  again  ;  and  as  I  have  been  drinking 
your  magic  beverage  for  a  week,  and  intend  to  pursue  it, 
you  may  fairly  claim  all  the  glory  of  my  recovery,  as  a  fairy 
cures  a  knight  after  a  tournament  or  a  battle.  I  have  a  great 
weakness  for  mutton  broth,  especially  with  that  magical 
sprinkle  which  you  did  not  forget.  I  shall  call  you  in  future 
after  an  old  legend  and  a  modern  poem, "  The  Lady  of  Shalott." 
*  *  *  *  *  * 

December  8,  1862. 

They  say  the  Greeks,  resolved  to  have  an  English  king, 
in  consequence  of  the  refusal  of  Prince  Alfred  to  be  their 
monarch,  intend  to  elect  Lord  Stanley.  If  he  accepts  the 
charge,  I  shall  lose  a  powerful  friend  and  colleague.  It  is  a 
dazzling  adventure  for  the  house  of  Stanley,  but  they  are  not 
an  imaginative  race,  and  I  fancy  they  will  prefer  Knowsley 
to  the  Parthenon  and  Lancashire  to  the  Attic  plains.  It  is  a 
privilege  to  live  in  this  age  of  rapid  and  brilliant  events. 
What  an  error  to  consider  it  a  utilitarian  age  !  It  is  one  of 
infinite  romance.  Thrones  tumble  down,  and  crowns  are 
offered  like  a  fairy  tale  ;  and  the  most  powerful  people  in  the 
world,  male  and  female,  a  few  years  back  were  adventurers, 
exiles,  and  demireps.      Vive  la  bagatelle  !    Adieu.     D. 

The  drama  of  a  religious  service  interested  Disraeli 
more  than  a  sermon.  Dean  Stanley  used  to  tell 
how  he  met  him  one  day  when  he  (the  Dean)  was 
going  incognito  to  hear  the  service  at  Westminster 
Abbey.  Disraeli  remarking,  "  I  like  these  Haroun 
al  Raschid  performances,"  went  with  him.  Every  one 
made  way  for  them,  and  for  a  short  time  Disraeli 
listened  to  the  sermon,  but  soon  began  to  fidget,  being 
obviously  bored.     "  A  very  remarkable  discourse,"  he 


LORD   CROMER   ON  DISRAELI  67 

said,  "  but  an  engagement  summons  me.  I  have  been 
deeply  interested — the  multitude,  the  lights,  the  sur- 
rounding darkness,  the  courtesy — all  most  remarkable. 
Good-bye,  my  dear  Dean." 

The  contrast  to  Gladstone  was  completed  by 
Disraeli's  unfailing  sense  of  humour.  Disraeli's  own 
consciousness  of  this  contrast  is  illustrated  in  the 
following  anecdote  related  by  Lord  George  Hamilton 
in  a  letter  to  myself,  from  which  the  writer  allows 
me  to  quote : 

In  the  Parliament  of  1868  (writes  Lord  George)  there 
were  a  number  of  young  members  on  the  Conservative  side 
like  myself  who  had  been  in  the  habit  of  taking  a  good  deal 
of  exercise.  As  members  of  Parliament  we  used  once  a  week 
to  row  in  an  eight  on  the  river  at  Maidenhead,  and  it  was 
suggested  that  as  a  joke  we  should  ask  Dizzy  to  steer  us.  I 
went  up  to  him  and  made  the  suggestion  that  if  he  would 
undertake  that  duty  we  would  challenge  an  eight  on  the  other 
side  with  the  Prime  Minister  (Mr.  Gladstone)  as  coxswain. 
He  replied  :  "All  right,  my  dear  boy,  but  the  other  damned 
fellow  won't  do  it,  you  know." 

I  submit  that  so  far  as  there  is  an  element  of  truth 
in  Lord  Cromer's  contention  that  Disraeli  was  not 
a  wholly  trustworthy  guide  in  politics,  the  fact  is  due 
not  to  his  being  a  self-seeking  adventurer  without 
principle — an  unjust  charge  suggested  in  part  by  his 
own  cynical  avowals  of  his  thirst  for  fame — but  to 
that  imaginative  temperament  which  was  in  many 
ways  so  attractive.  Self-seeking  was  not  more  marked 
in  him  than  in  many  another.  It  did  not  involve  a 
sacrifice  of  conviction  to  self-advancement.  He  had 
at  the  outset  to  choose  between  two  parties  with 
neither  of  which  he  agreed.  A  very  moderate  Tariff 
Reformer  in  our  own  day  may  pursue  his  honest  aims 


68  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

by  allying  himself  either  with  Unionist  Free  Traders 
or  with  Tariff  Reformers.  He  agrees  with  neither. 
By  either  alliance  he  works  against  the  fanatical  Tariff 
Reformers,  either  as  a  foe  from  without,  or  as  a  drag 
on  the  wheel  from  within.  He  is  free  to  be  opportunist 
in  his  choice  because  neither  alliance  means  sacrifice 
of  conviction.  It  was  not  Disraeli's  self-seeking  oppor- 
tunism which  prevented  his  being  a  wholly  safe  guide  ; 
it  was  rather  his  imaginative  and  dramatic  way  of 
looking  at  life  and  his  love  for  startling  effects — for 
green  trousers  in  Regent  Street.  While  imaginative 
genius  may  display  itself  in  very  remarkable  intuitive 
insight  in  particular  fields,  its  action  is  uncertain.  It 
often  fails  in  that  careful  attention  to  facts  and  conse- 
quences lying  outside  the  particular  field  which  more 
systematic  and  prosaic  methods  ensure.  It  is  too 
personal,  and  apt  to  be  wilful.  Mrs.  Jellyby  may 
have  worked  with  great  insight  for  the  natives  of 
Borrioboola  Gha,  but  she  was  not  a  successful  mother 
to  Caddy.  Where  Disraeli  saw  truly,  indeed,  he  might 
be  dramatic  in  his  methods  without  doing  any  one 
much  harm.  But  one  who  is  bent  on  being  sensational 
may  indulge  his  passion  in  other  fields  in  which  his 
touch  is  less  sure,  and  with  serious  consequences. 
And  he  may  neglect  very  necessary  work  which  does 
not  offer  scope  for  his  peculiar  genius  or  interest  his 
moody  temper.  Duty  is  often  dull,  and  dulness  was 
Disraeli's  pet  aversion.  Hence  a  certain  mistrust  of 
Disraeli  is  compatible  with  recognition  of  his  great 
qualities  as  a  statesman  in  some  departments.  At  the 
same  time,  more  tangible  instances  of  evil  consequences 
from  his  peculiar  temperament  must  be  adduced  than 
have  yet  been  formulated,  before  the  indictment 
against  him  becomes  very  damaging. 


LORD   CROMER   ON  DISRAELI  69 

It  is  notorious  that  moral  standards  in  public  life 
were  exceptionally  high  in  the  years  that  followed 
the  European  convulsions  of  the  later  years  of  the 
eighteenth  century  and  the  earlier  of  the  nineteenth, 
and  I  do  not  deny  that  there  is  at  present  apparently 
an  increase  of  adventurous  and  opportunist  statesman- 
ship which  plays  for  its  own  hand.  But  the  cause  I 
would  suggest  is  to  be  sought  rather  in  the  peculiar 
political  conditions  of  our  time  than  in  the  example  of 
Disraeli.  It  is  to  the  excesses  of  the  present  party 
system,  and,  I  may  add,  to  the  excesses  of  modern  de- 
mocracy, that  I  venture  to  ascribe  the  undeniable  fact 
that  principle  is  less  uncompromising  and  opportunism 
more  marked  in  the  political  personages  of  to-day  than 
it  was  with  those  belonging  to  the  age  of  our  fathers. 

When  party  allegiance  is  carried  to  an  extreme, 
individuality  is  crushed,  and  inflexible  assertion  of 
principle  becomes  far  harder  in  practice.  The  call  to 
subordinate  personal  convictions  to  party  decrees  is  so 
constant  that  political  independence  becomes  an  im- 
practicable attitude.  It  may  banish  a  man  from  public 
life  altogether.  Again,  when  we  have  to  gain  the 
approval  of  the  least  educated  classes  before  a  policy 
can  become  practical  politics,  statesmen  are  almost 
driven  to  the  arts  of  the  demagogue.  And  this  lowers 
the  standard  of  political  honesty.  So  far  as  the 
excesses  of  the  present  party  system  are  responsible 
for  the  diminution  of  political  principle,  the  remedy  is 
to  be  sought,  not  in  revolting  from  Disraeli's  example 
as  immoral,  but  in  attempting  to  realize  one  of  his 
own  early  dreams — the  formation  of  a  National  party, 
the  aims  of  which  should  be  higher  and  more  public- 
spirited  than  those  of  either  of  the  existing  political 
divisions. 


Ill 

GEORGE  WYNDHAM 

Much  was  written  of  Mr.  George  Wyndham  in  a 
generous  and  ungrudging  spirit  at  the  time  of  his 
death.  His  charm,  his  grace,  both  physical  and 
mental,  his  versatility  as  soldier,  man  of  letters  and 
statesman  were  all  commemorated ;  his  great  Land 
Act  in  Ireland  received  the  fullest  acknowledgment. 
People  were  really  moved  at  his  death,  and  with  a  few 
exceptions  the  chief  organs  of  public  opinion  for  a 
brief  space  gave  whole-hearted  acknowledgment  to 
what  public  opinion  held  that  he  had  done  well. 
Then  the  world  went  on  its  way  and  resumed  the 
absorbing  interests  from  which  it  had  turned  aside  for 
a  moment  to  bestow  attention  on  the  sudden  extinction 
of  a  brilliant  light. 

Yet  most  of  the  kind  things  that  were  said  might 
have  been  true  of  one  whose  gifts  were  immeasurably 
inferior  to  George  Wyndham's.  Many  of  us  feel,  as 
Mr.  Balfour  said  in  the  House  of  Commons  at  the 
time,  that  Mr.  Wyndham's  gifts  have  not  received 
their  full  meed  of  praise,  partly  because  they  never 
found  the  theatre  whence  they  could  be  so  exhibited 
as  to  be  unmistakable  to  the  world  at  large. 

"  What  is  truth  ?  "  asked  Pilate.  "  What  is  fame  ?  " 
is  a  question  similar  in  its  apparent  simplicity  and  in 
its   real   difficulty.     A   man's  greatness  is  apt  to  be 


GEORGE    WYNDHAM  71 

measured  by  the  test  which  is  most  of  all  affected  by 
the  chapter  of  accidents,  namely,  visible  success. 
That  is  the  most  obvious  test,  but  it  is  superficial  and 
often  wholly  inadequate.  William  Watson  has  told 
us  in  memorable  lines  that  "  the  facile  conqueror  "  may 
be  less  great  than  "  he,  who,  wounded  sore,  .  .  .  sinks 
foiled,  but  fighting  evermore."  Failure  may  be  more 
splendid  than  success.  But  in  the  case  before  us  the 
large  measure  of  success  actually  achieved  may  be  a 
serious  obstacle  to  the  general  recognition  of  the 
splendour  of  the  man's  failures.  Those  who  wish  to 
discourse  on  this  latter  aspect  of  his  career  have  not 
before  them  the  inspiring  task  of  rescuing  from 
obscurity  an  unknown  genius  who  was  crushed  and 
crowded  out  in  the  struggle  of  life  by  adverse  circum- 
stances. We  are  dealing  on  the  contrary  with  one 
who  for  years  seemed  to  be  fortune's  spoilt  child  ; 
whose  circumstances  and  position  were,  by  com- 
parison with  many  men  of  genius,  splendid  ;  who  was 
a  member  of  the  Government  at  an  age  when  most 
men  have  not  yet  got  into  Parliament ;  who  was  a 
Cabinet  Minister  in  the  front  rank  in  his  thirties. 
Yet  it  remains  true  that  George  Wyndham's  true  title 
to  greatness  can  only  be  measured  by  taking  into 
account  powers  and  actual  work  that  gave  sure 
promise  of  greater  public  successes  than  he  ever 
attained,  and  even  by  computing  the  elements  of 
tragedy  in  his  life.  The  test  supplied  by  tangible 
success  is  in  his  case  an  eminently  inadequate  test.  If 
it  remains  unchallenged  he  will  not  be  to  posterity 
what  he  really  was  in  life. 

Mr.  Wyndham  went  to  the  War  Office  as  Under- 
Secretary  in  1899.  And  his  work  there  stood  out  at 
once,    in   the   eyes  of  those  who  came  across  it,  as 


72  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

something  on  quite  a  different  plane  from  that  of  the 
ordinary  official,  even  of  first-class  ability.  Helped 
no  doubt  by  his  early  soldier  life,  he  studied  the 
requirements  of  our  army  with  the  large  outlook  of  a 
true  statesman.  To  the  end  of  his  life  his  speeches 
on  this  subject  were  most  memorable.  The  im- 
pression he  made  on  Lord  Lansdowne,  his  chief  at 
the  War  Office,  is  thus  recorded  by  him  in  a  letter 
to  the  present  writer  : 

You  ask  me  to  give  you  in  a  few  sentences  my  impression 
of  George  Wyndham's  work  at  the  War  Office.  It  was  my 
good  fortune  to  have  him  for  my  colleague  during  the  last  two 
years  of  my  service  as  Secretary  of  State.  The  War  Office 
was  not  then,  and  I  suppose  never  has  been,  exactly  a  bed  of 
roses.  Old  problems  of  army  organization  were  still  unsolved, 
new  problems  concerning  the  arms,  ammunition  and  equip- 
ment of  the  forces  were  constantly  arising,  and  the  machinery 
of  the  Office  itself,  recently  reconstructed,  was  not  yet 
working  smoothly.  On  the  top  of  all  this  came  the  South 
African  War,  with  its  new  responsibilities,  its  revelations  and 
its  disappointments.  The  stress  was  severe,  and  the  repre- 
sentative of  the  Department  in  the  House  of  Commons  had, 
so  far  as  the  Parliamentary  burden  was  concerned,  to  bear  by 
far  the  heaviest  share  of  the  load.  George  Wyndham  bore  it 
with  infinite  patience  and  good  temper,  and  with  untiring 
resourcefulness.  Inside  the  Office  he  was  a  tower  of  strength, 
a  keen  and  thorough  worker,  always  intent  upon  getting  at 
the  root  of  things.  He  had  a  rare  power  of  handling  difficult 
and  complicated  questions,  and  although  he  could  grasp 
details  and  expound  them  with  unrivalled  lucidity,  he  never 
lost  himself  in  them.  I  cannot  conceive  an  abler  or  a  more 
delightful  colleague. 

It  was  while  he  was  at  the  War  Office  that 
Wyndham  made  perhaps  his  greatest  speech  in  the 
House  of  Commons,  in  which  to  a  knowledge  of  his 


GEORGE   WYNDHAM  73 

own  subject  he  added  a  keen  realization  of  the  situation 
created  by  the  South  African  War,  which  was  putting 
so  many  English  homes  in  mourning.  This  combina- 
tion called  out  the  greatest  gifts  of  an  orator.  After 
that  speech  he  was  freely  spoken  of  as  a  future  Prime 
Minister.  It  was  thus  at  the  War  Office  that  he  won 
his  spurs.  Yet,  when,  nearly  four  years  later,  he  was 
offered  the  post  of  Secretary  for  War,  his  loyalty  to 
the  cause  of  Ireland,  to  which  he  had  by  then  devoted 
his  whole  heart,  made  him  decline  it.  Here,  then, 
was  one  sphere  in  which  he  showed  his  splendid 
powers  and  equipped  himself  for  a  great  work  for 
which  he  all  but  found  his  opportunity.  That  he  just 
missed  that  opportunity  was  in  its  circumstances 
almost  tragic.  For  had  he  then  gone  to  the  War 
Office,  he  would  have  escaped  the  check  in  Ireland 
that  threw  back  his  political  career,  and  he  would  have 
been  supreme  in  a  sphere  which  he  had  almost 
completely  mastered. 

But  the  tragedy  of  adverse  circumstance  was  far 
greater  in  Ireland  itself.  Here  he  had  actually  found 
both  his  field  and  the  position  in  which  he  could 
control  it.  After  a  brief  space  he  had  the  most 
influential  position  which  exists  in  that  country — he 
was  Chief  Secretary  and  in  the  Cabinet.  He  realized 
one  great  scheme  in  the  Land  Purchase  Act.  Those 
who  watched  things  closely  saw  the  extraordinary 
gifts  which  this  measure  displayed.  "  I  doubt," 
writes  Lord  Lansdowne,  "  whether  any  one  else 
could  have  carried  the  great  Land  Act  which  will 
always  be  associated  with  his  name,  and  which  will  be 
a  monument  to  him  are  perennius."  The  rest  of  his 
programme  remained  unfulfilled,  and  its  details  were 
never  disclosed  to  the  public.     A  large  section  of  his 


74  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

party  spoke  of  his  "  Irish  failure."  Yet  those  who 
worked  with  him  held  that  what  was  great  in  his 
plans  as  an  Irish  statesman  was  as  visible  in  schemes 
that  were  never  realized  as  in  the  initial  success. 
The  world  in  summing  up  a  man's  fame  deducts 
failure  from  success,  but  sometimes  a  truer  estimate  is 
gained  not  by  subtraction  but  by  an  addition  sum  in 
which  much  that  fails  is  added  to  what  succeeds. 
Had  George  Wyndham  come  to  Ireland  merely  as  an 
able  Chief  Secretary  with  a  safe  programme,  as  a 
party  politician  who  meant  to  climb  the  ladder,  we 
should,  it  is  true,  have  never  heard  of  the  Devolution 
Scheme — as  it  was  called,  though  Wyndham  never 
used  the  phrase  or  accepted  this  scheme  of  Lord 
Dunraven.  But  we  should  never  have  had  the 
Land  Act.  Both  the  measure  which  succeeded  and 
the  policy  of  conciliation  which  failed  told  of  qualities 
in  themselves  great.  It  needed  his  immense  energy, 
his  enthusiasm,  his  grasp  of  detail,  his  idealism,  his 
concentration  on  one  object,  to  gain  in  a  brief  space 
such  knowledge  and  insight  into  the  conditions  of  the 
country  as  were  necessary  to  formulate  that  far-reach- 
ing land  legislation.  But  these  very  qualities  led  him 
to  study  the  Irish  question  all  round,  not  as  a  party 
man  with  the  predetermined  limitations  of  a  party 
programme,  but  as  an  honest  student  of  Irish  history 
and  Irish  social  conditions,  and  to  conceive  an  ample 
programme  of  which  the  Land  Act  was  but  a  part. 

He  bound  himself  heart  and  soul  to  Ireland. 
"Ireland,"  he  wrote  to  a  friend  in  March,  1902,  "is 
in  a  more  plastic  state  than  at  any  period  in  my  re- 
collection since  1887.  Now  is  the  time  for  moulding 
her.  But  this  absorbs  me  mind,  body  and  soul." 
There  are  many  who  remember  the  joyous  enthusiasm 


GEORGE    WYNDHAM  75 

with  which  he  began  his  work.  The  dramatic  side  of 
his  position  in  Ireland  appealed  to  him.  "  I  feel  like 
a  Ghibelline  Duke  in  the  land  of  the  Guelphs,"  he 
said.  When  the  Land  Act  was  on  the  eve  of  passing, 
he  felt  the  peculiar  joy  that  comes  when  concentrated 
labour  and  inspiring  dreams  are  about  to  be  realized 
in  action.  "I  'do'  believe  that  a  benignant  spirit  is 
abroad,"  were  the  words  he  chose  at  this  time  for  an 
autograph  album.  The  picture  of  him,  radiant  and 
even  triumphant,  turning  from  one  group  to  another 
with  a  special  word  for  each,  as  he  addressed  the 
House  in  the  debate  on  the  second  reading  of  his  Bill, 
must  still  dwell  in  the  memory  of  many. 

The  Bill  became  law.  Troubles  were  not  at  once 
over.  But  it  was  recognized  as  a  great,  a  very  great, 
and  beneficent  measure,  the  greatest  contribution 
towards  the  settling  of  the  Irish  question  which  that 
generation  had  seen.  In  its  author's  eyes,  however, 
it  was  but  the  beginning  of  his  work.  In  the  months 
that  followed  he  continued  to  elaborate  his  schemes 
for  the  country.  He  refused  promotion  to  other  offices, 
which  the  ordinary  Chief  Secretary  would  have  grasped 
at,  as  an  escape  from  difficulties  which  soon  became 
visible  on  the  horizon.  He  continued  to  reduce  his 
plans  to  practical  detail.  Such  concentration  is  the  way 
of  the  greatest  rulers,  but  one  must  be  an  autocrat 
like  Napoleon  to  realize  all  the  designs  so  conceived. 
They  may  be  impossible  to  the  party  statesman  in  a 
democracy.  The  policy  of  conciliation  was  wrecked 
on  the  rocks  of  party  politics.  Its  bare  discussion 
(Wyndham  never  committed  himself  finally  to  any 
detailed  scheme)  was  viewed  almost  as  treachery  by 
the  Ulster  extremists. 

But  the   tragedy  lay  in   something   deeper  than 


76  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

the  defeat  of  any  single  item  of  his  programme. 
Few  men  are  capable  of  thinking  out  a  programme 
which  needed  so  profound  a  study  of  the  country, 
and  making  it  practical.  Wyndham  believed  him- 
self to  be  capable  of  this.  Many  of  his  friends 
thought  the  same.  The  tragedy  lay  in  the  hard 
work  and  the  keen  vision  of  what  was  possible  and 
of  his  own  capacity  to  do  it,  while  the  inexorable 
conditions  of  our  democracy  defeated  his  plans,  not  as 
it  seemed  to  him  by  a  reasoned  opposition,  but  by 
that  blind  and  all-powerful  party  prejudice,  which 
makes  democracy  so  often  fatal  to  the  schemes  of 
genius.  Wyndham's  outlook  at  starting  was  simply 
that  of  a  Unionist  by  tradition.  And  to  the  end 
he  was  no  advocate  of  Home  Rule.  But,  by  force  of 
study  and  experience  of  the  country,  he  came  to  hold 
that,  if  men  strove  to  emancipate  themselves  from 
party  prejudice,  Ireland  might  be  developed  on 
genuinely  Irish  lines.  And  this  would  in  all  prob- 
ability have  included  in  course  of  time  a  certain  limited 
concession  to  the  Irish  desire  for  self-government. 
"What  I  preached,  in  season  and  out  of  season,"  he 
wrote  two  years  later,  "  was  that  all,  no  matter  to  what 
party  they  belonged,  and  what  extreme  views  they 
might  hold,  should  endeavour  to  agree  on  practical 
proposals  of  a  moderate  character."  It  was  the  clear 
vision  of  what  he  could  do  as  he  stood  but  one  foot 
below  the  commanding  summit  whence  he  might  have 
actually  achieved  it  that  made  his  enforced  descent  a 
veritable  tragedy.  According  to  the  world's  verdict 
this  episode  brings  a  heavy  deduction  from  the  figures 
which  stand  to  the  account  of  his  fame.  If  statesman- 
ship means  solely  the  careful  calculation  of  what  party 
conditions  will  admit  of,  such  a  verdict  may  pass.     If, 


GEORGE    WYNDHAM  77 

however,  the  highest  statesmanship  means  the  accurate 
perception  of  the  needs  of  a  country  and  insight  as  to 
how  they  are  best  met,  there  are  those  who  hold  that 
such  a  verdict  must  not  only  be  discounted  but 
reversed.  The  ideals  which  caused  his  overthrow 
bring,  according  to  this  view  of  the  case,  an  immense 
accession  to  the  figures  which  stand  to  the  account  of 
his  genius.  The  failure  was  in  party  diplomacy  ;  the 
success  was  in  formulating  those  measures  which 
mark  a  great  ruler.  So  at  least  many  of  us  think ; 
and  the  only  real  test  whether  or  no  we  are  right 
in  so  thinking  was  denied  to  him — namely,  a  fair 
trial. 

This  was  the  great  tragedy  of  his  public  life.  The 
case  of  a  man  of  great  imagination,  who  is  unpractical, 
is  not  an  uncommon  one.  But  it  has  not  the  peculiar 
element  that  made  Wyndham's  failure  so  tragic.  On 
the  contrary,  where  the  dreamer  is  impotent,  Wyndham 
was  powerful.  He  had  the  rare  combination  of  power 
of  imaginative  conception  with  grasp  of  detail  and 
the  ability  to  reduce  his  plans  to  practice.  Vivid  as 
was  the  life  of  imagination  which  he  lived,  it  never 
made  him  a  dreamer.  When  the  whole  instrument 
was  under  his  own  control,  he  could  reduce  to  practice 
his  own  complicated  schemes.  The  programme  for 
his  Irish  campaign  was  the  result  of  brooding 
imagination,  of  laborious  study  and  penetrating 
observation,  with  the  one  object  of  discovering  what 
was  best  for  the  country.  But  it  is  the  condition 
of  democratic  government  that  one  must  often  be 
satisfied  with  the  second  best.  A  man  whose  insight 
is  ahead  of  public  opinion,  and  who  concentrates  his 
whole  attention  on  discovering  the  best,  therefore 
fails  by  his  very  success.     The  intense  hopefulness  of 


78  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

Wyndham's  nature  prevented  his  learning  effectively 
this  painful  fact  until  it  was  too  late  as  far  as  Ireland 
was  concerned.  His  very  consciousness  that  he  had 
faced  the  intrinsic  difficulties  of  his  schemes  made 
him  forget  the  extrinsic.  The  semblance  of  supreme 
power  in  a  Chief  Secretary  who  was  in  the  Cabinet 
made  him  misjudge — not  what  was  practicable  in  the 
country  for  an  autocratic  ruler — but  the  forces  which, 
in  fact,  limited  his  own  power.  The  tragedy  was 
that  of  one  who  believes  himself  to  see  clearly  what 
is  needed  and  how  he  himself  can  do  it,  and  is  on 
the  point  of  doing  it  when  he  finds  himself  bound 
hand  and  foot  and  unable  to  move. 

He  was  never  again  so  near  to  realizing  in  action 
his  great  powers  in  the  field  of  practical  politics.  He 
never  held  office  again.  He  made  memorable  contri- 
butions to  debates — notably  on  the  education  question 
and  on  army  matters.  But  he  had  had  a  rebuff  and 
had  to  bide  his  time.  His  friends  were  confident  that 
that  time  would  come.  But  it  did  not.  Death  put 
an  end  to  such  hopes. 

And  in  literature  as  in  politics  he  showed  powers 
which  never  had  a  quite  adequate  field  for  their 
exercise,  great  literary  gifts  were  visible  in  a  few 
memorable  works — the  Introduction  to  Shakespeare s 
Sonnets,  the  Preface  to  North's  translation  of 
Plutarch's  Lives,  the  Essay  on  the  Poetry  of  Ronsard, 
the  Addresses  on  the  Springs  of  Romance  in  the 
Literature  of  Europe  and  on  Sir  Walter  Scott,  and  some 
very  perfect  translations.  But  his  gifts  never  found 
expression  in  the  magnum  opus  that  so  great  a  master 
of  thought  and  style  alike  could  and  would  some  day 
have  given  us.  What  he  accomplished  was  of  the 
first  order  in  quality,  and  won  high  appreciation  from 


GEORGE    WYNDHAM  79 

the  experts,  but  the  full  reach  of  his  mind  and  know- 
ledge was  never  represented  in  his  published  works. 
The  very  richness  of  his  mind  made  him  need  time 
to  make  his  thoughts  "  marketable,"  to  reduce  them 
to  the  form  which  the  practical  requirements  of 
literature  and  life  demand.  Thoughts  which  crowded 
his  own  exceptional  intellect  and  imagination  as  one 
whole  needed  to  be  broken  up  and  subdivided  for 
others. 

I  remember  one  address  of  his  as  Lord  Rector  of 
Glasgow  University  which  was  so  packed  with  thought 
that  it  would  have  formed  the  subject  of  a  great  work. 
As  it  stood,  while  careful  readers  and  thinkers  saw 
how  pregnant  were  its  suggestions,  it  inevitably 
passed  over  the  heads  of  an  audience  which  needed 
for  its  comprehension  subdivision,  explication,  and 
illustration  for  which  the  opportunity  gave  him  no 
time  or  scope.  And  this  instance  is  typical  of  many 
another.  Those  who  had  the  best  opportunity  of 
knowing  his  mind  felt  that  his  work  hitherto  had  been 
an  elaborate  preparation  for  the  day  when  complete 
and  unmistakable  public  achievement  should  bring 
home  to  the  world  at  large  the  full  extent  of  gifts 
which  were  known  to  many  friends.  That  day  never 
came.  He  was  cut  off  at  the  very  season  at  which 
his  powers  were  attaining  their  full  ripeness  for 
practical  use,  and  when  experience  was  making  him 
more  fully  alive  to  the  necessary  conditions  for 
effectively  conveying  to  others  the  stores  of  his  own 
mind. 

In  estimating  George  Wyndham,  then,  one  must 
speak  primarily  of  what  he  was,  and  of  what  he 
thought  and  planned.  He  and  his  work  can  no  more 
be    gauged    by   his   visible   successes    than    Burke's 


8o  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

speeches  can  be  estimated  by  their  effect  on  the 
House  of  Commons.  When  Burke  rose,  the  House 
soon  emptied.  Yet  to  us,  who  now  read  the  speeches 
at  leisure,  their  greatness  is  unmistakable.  Similarly 
the  interest  of  Wyndham's  mind  and  his  potential 
statesmanship  are  something  far  greater  than  what  the 
chapter  of  accidents  allowed  him  to  impress  unmistak- 
ably on  the  world  at  large.  This  was  due  partly,  as 
in  Burke's  case,  to  certain  defects  in  the  man's  power 
of  making  himself  felt  at  once  by  the  many ;  but  in 
the  field  of  practical  statesmanship  which  Burke  never 
occupied  it  was  due  far  more  to  accidental  condi- 
tions specially  hampering  to  his  peculiar  genius. 

What  Wyndham  thought  and  planned  will  not  be 
known  fully  until  a  selection  from  his  correspondence 
and  private  memoranda  is  published.  But  an  idea 
of  his  methods  and  personality  may  be  gained  by  the 
study  of  his  speeches  and  writings,  and  to  these  may 
here  be  added  some  account  of  the  man  as  he  was 
known  to  his  many  friends. 

The  two  salient  gifts  that  ran  through  all  his  work, 
in  literature  as  well  as  in  politics,  were  just  those 
which  were  noted  by  Lord  Lansdowne  at  the  War 
Office,  and  by  his  colleagues  in  Ireland — the  imagina- 
tive and  intellectual  perception  which  went  to  the 
core  of  things,  and  his  grasp  of  detail.  These  gifts 
are  generally  the  possession  of  different  persons. 
The  genius  who  makes  an  outline  sketch  of  a  scheme 
is  not  generally  the  man  who  fills  in  the  details 
and  makes  it  practicable.  The  man  who  writes  the 
most  brilliant  essay  is  not,  as  a  rule,  the  man  who 
undertakes  research  that  is  thorough  and  exhaustive. 
Wyndham  could  do  both.  This  is  a  combination 
people  are  slow  to  believe  in.   Wyndham's  "  viewiness  " 


GEORGE    WYNDHAM  81 

in  politics  was  to  many  a  proof  that  he  was  not 
practical.  So,  too,  in  literature.  His  delicate  style 
and  poet's  sense  of  form  in  his  writing  made  people 
slow  to  believe  in  the  extent  of  his  research  and 
even  in  the  depth  of  his  thought.  Yet  in  both  fields 
he  was  untiring  and  thorough.  Those  who  were  with 
him  in  the  War  Office  and  in  the  Irish  Office  know 
the  infinitude  of  labour  he  spent  in  accumulating 
detail.  I  often  saw  him  after  a  full  eight  hours  spent 
in  the  British  Museum,  while  he  was  writing  his 
short  introduction  to  Shakespeare  s  Sonnets.  Like 
all  real  workers,  he  did  not  spare  himself.  Half  a 
page  of  published  work  might  represent  what  it  had 
taken  days,  perhaps  weeks,  of  reading  to  discover. 
The  extent  of  his  reading  in  a  man  who  led  a  busy 
life  of  action  surprised  many  who  talked  much  with 
him  on  literature  or  on  history.  I  once  asked  him 
when  he  had  found  time  for  it.  He  told  me  that 
the  bulk  of  it  was  done  in  his  soldier  days.  He  was 
quartered,  I  think,  in  Cyprus,  for  many  months,  and 
used  to  parade  his  men  at  six  or  seven  in  the  morn- 
ing and  read  from  breakfast  to  an  eight  o'clock 
dinner.  This  intellectual  orgy  was  most  character- 
istic, and  that  he  remembered  what  he  read  after  a 
spell  of  uninterrupted  work  which  would  reduce  most 
brains  to  stupidity  was  a  testimony  to  his  splendid 
powers.  The  extent  of  his  reading  and  the  extent  of 
his  study  of  detail  in  politics  were  as  remarkable  as 
the  gifts  of  thought  and  imagination  displayed  in  the 
use  of  his  knowledge. 

But  besides  that  imaginative  insight  which 
belongs  to  the  speculative  intellect  he  had  also  the 
imagination  of  the  poet  which  threw  a  halo  round  his 
everyday  tasks.     The  poetry  of  life's  drama  is  often 

G 


82  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

visible  in  historical  retrospect.  But  the  actors  are 
seldom  fully  alive  to  it  at  the  time.  Wyndham,  how- 
ever, was  alive  to  the  drama  while  he  was  working 
hardest.  Thus  he  drank  deeper  than  most  men  of  the 
cup  of  life. 

All  this  was  apparent  in  his  conversation.  At  its 
best  it  was  wonderful.  There  was  an  animation  which 
infected  the  company  in  which  he  talked.  It  had 
humour  and  humanity.  He  made  everything  he 
dealt  with  seem  intensely  worth  while  ;  and  the  width 
of  his  information  on  his  favourite  topics  never  made 
him  prosy.  At  times,  at  the  small  dinners  of  The 
Club — which  still  endeavours  to  preserve  the  tradi- 
tions of  Johnson  and  Burke  and  Gibbon — he  would 
take  his  part  in  talk  on  poetry,  and  he  and  Edward 
Pember  would  discourse  with  ample  quotation  on 
Byron  or  on  Browning.  But  his  talk  on  wider  and 
more  theoretic  subjects  was  even  better.  Perhaps  it 
seemed  at  times  to  unsympathetic  listeners  a  little 
overpowering,  and  he  would  be  impatient  of  interrup- 
tion. But  if  a  listener  was  prepared  to  make  the 
self-sacrifice  involved  in  playing  avowedly  only  a 
secondary  part,  he  would  be  amply  rewarded. 

Yet  his  way  of  talking  had  in  it  certain  qualities 
which  might  prevent  its  conveying  at  once  and  to 
all  some  of  his  most  remarkable  endowments.  Most 
of  these  qualities  were  veritably  "  qualities "  as 
opposed  to  "defects."  For  one  thing,  his  imaginative 
thought  was  so  crowded  and  it  took  in  at  a  glance  so 
wide  a  field,  that  his  first  utterance  might  be  in  the 
highest  degree  cryptic.  It  might  appear,  especially 
to  prosaic  or  legal  minds,  almost  nonsense.  Analogies 
were  thrown  together,  drawn  from  regions  the  most 
distant  from  each  other.     Extreme  paradox  might  be 


GEORGE    WYNDHAM  83 

apparent  in  the  first  sketch  he  threw  out  of  a  really 
pregnant  view.  Yet  if  one  cross-examined  him 
patiently,  and  at  length,  the  utterance  in  question 
would  stand  it.  The  chaos  was  gradually  reduced  to 
order.  Strong  underlying  common-sense  was  often 
revealed,  after  some  incidental  paradox  and  exaggera- 
tion had  been  reluctantly  discarded.  Exact  and 
orderly  thought  was  found  to  lie  at  the  root  of  the 
most  startling  and  vague  sentences.  Again  and  again 
the  present  writer  has  in  the  course  of  an  hour  or  two 
(for  it  might  take  that  time)  drawn  from  Wyndham  a 
most  able  and  explicit  development  of  what  had 
scared  and  even  driven  away  from  the  group  of 
talkers  some  who  took  half  a  dozen  obscure  sentences 
to  be  merely  the  characteristic  flights  of  a  strange 
and  active  fancy,  not  to  be  regarded  seriously. 

Another  peculiarity  which  sometimes  detracted 
from  his  persuasiveness  in  writing  as  well  as  in  speak- 
ing, was  his  fine  sense  of  words.  In  this  he  was  both 
an  artist  and,  to  some  slight  extent,  a  pedant.  The 
words  were  usually  chosen  with  a  very  delicate  sense 
of  their  fitness.  But  he  once  owned  that  he  liked  to 
create  surprise  by  them — to  put  forward  the  word  his 
hearer  did  not  expect.  This  was  apt  to  concentrate 
attention  too  much  on  the  form  of  his  speech.  Hence 
at  moments  there  was  a  touch  of  preciousness  almost 
a  semblance  of  affectation  in  the  phrases  of  one  who 
was  essentially  the  reverse  of  an  affected  man ;  who 
was  really  intent  on  thought  and  the  reality  of  things, 
though  he  loved  beauty  as  well.  I  think  this  quality 
somewhat  damaged  his  effectiveness  in  the  House  of 
Commons.  And  an  over-great  sensitiveness  to  hos- 
tile opinion  in  the  House  had  at  times  a  similar  effect 
in  lessening  the  persuasive  power  of  one  who  was  a 


84  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

real  orator.  A  hostile  or  unsympathetic  atmosphere 
seemed  to  put  something  out  of  tune  in  the  delicate 
mechanism  of  his  mind.  It  brought  a  note  of  anxiety, 
unnatural  to  one  who  was  most  at  home  when  he  was 
sanguine  or  even  triumphant. 

But  the  form  of  his  diction  was  a  more  frequent  if 
a  less  serious  obstacle  to  complete  success  than  the 
nature  of  his  audience.  On  one  occasion  he  said  to  a 
friend  before  rising  in  the  House :  "  I  mean  to  speak 
in  chiselled  sentences."  The  "chiselled  sentences" 
were  very  beautiful,  perhaps  too  beautiful.  Their 
carefully  elaborated  symmetry  told  of  a  mind  divided 
between  the  form  and  the  matter.  The  peculiar  force 
of  utter  concentration  on  the  argument  was,  at  such 
times,  wanting.  He  lacked  the  complete  persuasive- 
ness attaching  to  a  speaker  who  is  so  full  of  his  sub- 
ject as  to  be  wholly  careless  of  form.  Carlyle  found  a 
stumbling  and  halting  speech  of  the  Duke  of  Wel- 
lington the  most  persuasive  of  all  that  he  heard  in 
the  House  of  Lords,  because  it  carried  with  it  the 
sense  of  concentrated  conviction.  Wyndham  in  reality 
spoke  with  deep  conviction,  but  his  attention  to  form, 
and  the  nature  of  the  form  actually  chosen,  were  apt 
sometimes  to  diminish  the  sense  of  conviction  he  con- 
veyed to  others.  When  this  impediment  was  absent, 
when  over-great  subtlety  too  was  absent,  when  he 
almost  forgot  niceties  of  form,  and  the  human  touch 
prevailed  over  all  else,  then  the  great  powers  of 
imagination  and  reasoning  apparent  in  his  speeches 
were  realized  to  the  full  by  his  hearers.  On  such 
comparatively  rare  occasions  he  could  hold  the  House 
as  only  the  greatest  orators  hold  it. 

Experienced  members  have  assured  the  present 
writer    that    they   have   never    seen    that   fastidious 


GEORGE    WYNDHAM  85 

assembly  so  profoundly  moved  as  it  was  by  his  speech 
on  the  war  on  February  1,  1900.  That  speech  even 
now  appeals  to  those  who  read  it  as  a  great  one.  A 
little  exercise  of  historical  imagination  will  make  its 
reader  realize  why  it  moved  the  House  of  Commons 
and  the  country  so  profoundly.  His  words  had  that 
note  of  concentration  on  the  realities  of  a  great  crisis, 
of  rising  above  the  petty  conventions  of  party  politics, 
which  marked  Wyndham's  work  in  Ireland  later  on. 
It  was  a  moment  when  Englishmen  had  just  become 
alive  to  the  fact  that  the  South  African  War  was  an 
enterprise  which  called  for  the  whole-hearted  devotion 
of  a  nation ;  when  many  families  had  that  deep  and 
tragic  realization  of  the  situation  which  is  brought 
about  by  the  death  of  kinsmen  on  the  battlefield ; 
when  the  nation  was,  in  fact,  rising  splendidly  to  the 
demand  on  it;  when  the  army  had  to  recover  from 
grave  reverses.  The  Government  was  asking  for  the 
money  that  was  needed  to  strengthen  our  armaments. 
The  nation  was  preparing  for  a  generous  response, 
and  this  moment  was  chosen,  in  accordance  with  the 
most  futile  traditions  of  party  politics,  to  move  an 
amendment  to  the  Address  which  included  a  vote  of 
censure  on  the  Government  for  its  "want  of  know- 
ledge, judgment,  and  foresight  in  their  preparations 
for  the  war."  Wyndham  stripped  the  proposal  of  its 
conventional  character,  and  insisted  that  it  should  be 
translated  into  terms  of  reality.  If  the  vote  were 
carried,  it  would  mean  that  to  the  strain  of  the  war 
was  to  be  added  the  distracting  turmoil  of  a  general 
election,  and  all  the  confusion  attending  on  a  change 
of  Government.  And  this  on  the  strength  of  criticism 
which  was  obviously  nothing  better  or  more  sincere 
than  that  party  fault-finding  which  was  just  the  rule 


86  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

of  the  parliamentary  game.  Wyndham  fairly  amazed 
the  House  by  the  thoroughness  of  his  detailed  justi- 
fication of  the  Government.  But,  even  apart  from 
the  weakness  of  the  attack,  it  was  a  moment  at 
which  such  party  manoeuvring  was  unworthy  and  most 
inopportune.  Let  us  have,  Wyndham  pleaded,  all 
such  criticism  from  Liberal  members  as  may  help  the 
Government  to  carry  out  the  great  national  task  suc- 
cessfully. But  a  vote  of  censure  at  such  a  moment 
was  the  negation  of  patriotism  and  the  reductio  ad 
absurdum  of  party  manoeuvring. 

His  peroration  was  long  remembered.  He  ap- 
pealed to  a  wider  public  opinion,  which  took  account 
of  facts,  against  this  petty  move  which  took  account 
only  of  the  chessboard  of  the  party  game. 

We  who  are  initiated  in  these  manoeuvres,  which  though, 
perhaps,  in  ordinary  times  pardonable,  are  at  this  moment 
inopportune,  may  understand  them  ;  but  no  one  else  will. 
The  taxpayer  who  is  prepared  to  foot  this  Bill,  whatever  it 
may  be,  and  who  is  perhaps  even  now  thinking  of  taking  his 
children  back  from  school  and  of  foregoing  his  autumn  holi- 
day, he  will  not  understand  it.  Our  critics  abroad,  who  are 
not  too  indulgent,  they  will  not  understand  it.  Our  fellow- 
subjects  in  Natal,  who  have  perhaps  seen  their  sons  die  on 
the  battlefield,  and  their  homesteads  destroyed,  they  will  not 
understand  this  amendment  and  this  debate.  Our  kinsmen 
in  America,  who  are  watching  the  vicissitudes  of  this  war, 
they  will  not  understand  it.  The  legislatures  of  every  single 
colony  in  our  Empire,  which  have  shown  such  a  whole-hearted 
and  single-minded  concentration  upon  the  Imperial  aspects, 
and  upon  none  other,  of  our  present  difficulties,  will  not  under- 
stand it.  Let  us,  let  this  honoured  and  ancient  assembly,  of 
which  they  are  all  offshoots  and  children,  bear  that  in  mind. 
It  is  usual,  Sir,  to  conclude  such  a  speech  in  defence,  or,  as  I 
would  prefer  to  say,  in  explanation  of  the  conduct  of  the 
Government  with  an  appeal  to  the  House  to  reject  the  vote 


GEORGE    IVYNDHAM  87 

of  censure  which  is  proposed  ;  but  I  am  sure  that  in  this  case 
such  an  appeal  is  unnecessary.  I  shall  have  to  make  an 
appeal  upon  questions  of  practical  importance  and  living 
moment.  I  shall  have  to  ask  this  House  for  large  financial 
facilities  in  order  that  this  war  may  be  prosecuted  to  the  only 
conclusion  which  the  country  would  tolerate.  I  shall  have  to 
ask  the  House  for  still  further  financial  facilities  in  order  that 
our  system  of  military  defence  may  be  placed  upon  a  sound 
and  lasting  basis.  I  do  not  ask  the  House  to  reject  this  vote 
of  censure.  No,  Sir  ;  this  House,  which  is  the  fountain  of  our 
Imperial  resources,  and  which  is  the  ultimate  guardian  of  the 
nation's  honour,  will  not  commit  itself  to  an  action  which, 
if  perpetrated,  would  make  the  mother  of  parliaments  a 
laughing-stock  to  the  world. 

Here  we  have  all  the  simplicity  of  great  oratory  ; 
but,  as  I  have  said,  it  was  not  always  so  in  Wyndham's 
speeches,  or  in  the  discourses  to  his  friends  which 
formed  part  of  his  table  talk. 

There  was  at  times  something  of  the  moodiness  of 
the  poet  in  Wyndham's  talk,  something  also  in  ex- 
travagant phrases  chosen  which  might  suggest  a  very 
different  man  from  what  he  was.  The  real  man 
was  seen  in  the  hunting-field,  as  he  was  seen  by 
his  secretaries  working  with  immense  industry  and 
splendid  intelligence  at  the  most  complicated  details  of 
the  regular  business  of  Ireland,  or  at  schemes  for  the 
improvement  of  the  country.  In  both  cases  there 
were  courage,  practical  capacity  and  thoroughness. 
His  facility  in  doing  what  was  difficult  to  other  men 
never  made  him  slipshod.  But  just  as  the  fop  in 
Nelson  hardly  prepared  men  for  the  great  sailor  and 
commander,  so  some  of  Wyndham's  conversation  in 
which  the  sensitive  poet  and  the  fastidious  scholar 
stood  revealed  did  not  prepare  men  for  his  thorough- 
ness, and  made  those  who  were  not  actually  in  contact 


88  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

with  it  even  sceptical  as  to  its  existence.  In  the 
House  of  Commons,  too,  the  graceful  figure  and  the 
graceful  action  and  the  graceful  phrases  would  often 
suggest  something  in  which  ornament  was  so  predomi- 
nant that  many  refused  to  look  further.  The  present 
writer  has  had  hot  arguments  with  members  of  the 
House  who  could  not  be  brought  to  regard  Wyndham 
as  much  more  than  a  brilliant  ornament  with  neither 
taste  nor  talent  for  real  business  or  hard  work.  It 
is  true  that  mere  plodding  was  not  to  his  taste 
— and  this  gave  a  superficial  plausibility  to  such  an 
estimate.  But,  given  a  crisis  or  a  cause  which  roused 
him,  he  displayed  unmistakably  the  combination  of 
imaginative  glow  with  hard  work  which  is  the  true 
realization  of  the  saying  that  genius  involves  an  infinite 
capacity  for  taking  pains. 

Perhaps  I  only  complete  the  statement  of  what  has 
already  been  implied  if  I  add  that  he  led  constantly 
and  intensely  two  lives,  one  of  the  imagination  and 
affections,  and  the  other  of  laborious  action.  I  do  not 
deny  that  the  poet  in  him  weakened  in  some  degree 
the  man  of  action.  The  life  of  imagination  brought, 
as  I  have  said,  a  certain  moodiness.  It  brought  undue 
sensitiveness.  Here  he  differed  from  Disraeli,  whose 
skin  remained  tough  in  spite  of  his  literary  and  imagi- 
native gifts.  But  it  was  surprising  how  vigorous  both 
lives  were  in  Wyndham.  The  public  is  very  slow 
indeed  to  believe  in  such  a  combination.  Men  are 
apt  to  judge  by  general  rules,  and  exceptions  must  be 
proved  to  the  hilt  that  they  may  be  acknowledged. 
More  than  ever  in  our  own  day  people  are  supposed 
to  have  one  line,  and  one  only,  in  which  they  really 
excel.  Members  of  the  House  of  Commons  and 
many   who   only   casually  conversed   with  him  were 


GEORGE    WYNDHAM  89 

therefore  apt  to  take  him  as  a  brilliant  amateur  in 
fields  where  he  really  was  the  equal,  nay  the  superior, 
of  many  professionals.  True — be  it  said  again — it 
needed  a  crisis,  or  a  stimulating  cause,  to  bring  out  all 
his  powers.  But  those  who  from  experience  had 
been  gradually  convinced  of  their  great  reach  felt 
confident  that  such  a  crisis  must  arise  and  again  give 
him  his  opportunity  and  his  stimulus,  as  the  land 
question  in  Ireland  had  given  them,  and  that  he 
would  some  day  suddenly  stand  before  all  the  world 
as  the  man  of  the  hour.  Hence  the  close  of  a  career 
admittedly  brilliant  comes  before  many,  as  it  does 
before  Mr.  Balfour,  as  a  tragedy  ;  for  the  "  what  might 
have  beens  "  stand  before  them  in  Wyndham's  case 
as  possibilities  so  vivid  as  to  be  little  removed  from 
certainties. 

The  man  has  gone.  We  have  his  speeches.  We 
have  his  written  works.  Neither  reveal  him  fully. 
The  written  works  are  highly  specialized,  and  do  not 
give  the  reach  of  his  mind,  or  give  it  only  in  occasional 
glimpses.  We  shall  see  the  man  better  whenever  a 
selection  is  published  from  his  poems  and  his  letters. 
These  will  indicate  his  touch  on  life  as  a  whole.  His 
letters  have  very  much  of  the  quality  of  his  talk. 
They  are  intensely  alive.  They  have  occasionally 
the  touch  of  preciousness  in  the  use  of  words,  the 
vivid  and  at  moments  fantastic  imagination,  the  ex- 
aggerated phrases,  as  well  as  the  underlying  core  of 
profound  thought  which  were  observable  in  his  con- 
versation. I  am  allowed,  in  order  to  give  actuality 
to  my  words  in  a  day  when  we  often  get  fancy 
pictures  not  at  all  resembling  the  originals,  to  quote  a 
few  specimens  of  his  letters  to  myself,  often  thrown  off 
at  white  heat. 


90  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

Wyndham  would  at  times  in  his  letters  philosophize 
subtly  on  political  life,  or  on  the  art  of  oratory ;  or 
he  would  analyze  his  own  sensations  in  enacting  the 
drama  before  him.  This  shows  a  habit  of  mind  which 
is  very  rare  indeed  in  a  man  of  action.  Here  is  a 
study  of  the  conditions  of  mob  oratory,  written  on  the 
occasion  of  his  speech  at  the  Congress  of  April,  1906, 
on  the  proposed  Education  Bill : 

It  is  a  great  tax  to  speak  in  that  Hall.  Two  ladies  who 
were  there  to-day  told  me  that  the  echo  made  Balfour  hard 
to  follow  and  that  it  was  a  strain  to  hear  me.  One  has  to 
discard  most  of  a  speaker's  devices.  No  one  can  see  the 
speaker's  expression  and — if  they  have  to  listen  intently — no 
one  can  be  affected  by  inflections  of  the  voice. 

So  the  speaker  has  to  aim  at  broad,  simple  effects.  But 
that  entails  severe  mental  concentration  and,  all  the  time, 
there  is  a  dead  weight  to  be  lifted  without  much  help  from  the 
audience.  Nobody  could  speak  to  a  hostile  audience  in  that 
arena.  To  say  that,  is  to  say  that  a  speaker  has  to  discard 
his  principal  function,  i.e.  pleading.  He  must  Declaim  and 
Declare,  i.e.  physically  make  striking,  and  mentally  make 
simple,  what  everybody  is  prepared  to  admit. 

And  yet,  I  agree  with  you  about  the  concourse.  The 
facts  that  so  many  people  have  come  from  so  many  places  to 
be  in  one  place  for  one  purpose,  make  one  great  fact — of 
sense,  and  thought,  and  feeling.  The  ingredients  make  the 
magic  broth.  The  speaker  has  but  to  stir  it  with  a  big  wooden 
spoon. 

More  entirely  a  record  of  his  own  sensations  is  the 
following,  written  amid  his  own  election  campaign  of 
the  same  year  : 

I  have  been  speaking  all  over  the  country  to  good  audiences. 
It  is  a  strange  experience  and,  I  imagine,  a  bad  one  on  the 
whole.     To  be  the  centre  of  cheering  and  yelling  for  nearly 


GEORGE   WYNDHAM  91 

five  weeks  cannot  be  good  for  the  soul,  the  mind  or  the  body. 
The  general  impression  to  me  is  always  barbaric  and  some- 
times savage. 

But  it  has  a  good  side.  All  barriers  of  birth,  and  wealth, 
and  education  are  cast  down.  You  make  real  intimate  friends 
of  men  whom  otherwise  you  would  never  have  known.  The 
intimacy  of  naked  contention  is  bracing,  though  primitive. 
And  there  are  pretty  touches.  .  .  .  But,  in  the  main,  the 
whole  business  is  blatant  and  barbaric. 

He  would  dream  of  the  past  at  the  end  of  the 
year,  and  his  memories  would  bring  the  veritable 
poet's  touch  on  the  beauty  and  interest  of  life.  In 
thanking  for  a  Christmas  present  on  the  last  day  of 
1899,  he  writes  : 

I  am  alone  here  with  memories  and  work.  But  I  am  not  at 
all  unhappy.  I  begin  to  see  that  it  will  not  be  so  very  terrible 
to  be  old  and  alone.  We  are  led  on  to  understand  the  eternity 
of  all  fair  things  by  intimate  experience,  and  apart  from 
metaphysical  speculation. 

Now  that  Westminster,  that  kind  heart  and  chivalrous 
gentleman,  is  dead  ;  that  A.  is  away ;  B.  married  ;  my  little 
Percy  going  to  Eton  in  less  than  a  year ;  myself  without  a 
prospect  beyond  labour  at  the  demands  of  the  moment ;  the 
whole  past  twelve  years  rise  up  and  sing  together  of  the 
loving-kindness  and  beauty  which  has  been  round  me.  No 
gentle  act  or  graceful  movement  of  those  who  have  adorned 
my  life  can  ever  die. 

So  I  sit  alone  at  the  end  of  this  year  of  travail  and 
anxiety,  rejoicing.  And  I  thank  you  from  a  full  heart  for 
your  gift  and  friendship. 

Again,  at  the  end  of  1906  : 

At  last,  to-night,  I  finish  this  working  year. 
We   buried   the   Education   Bill   this  afternoon.     I  have 
won  my  election,  made  speeches,  published  my  little  book, 


92  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

made  new  friends,  fought  old  enemies.     I  have  lived,  and  life 
is  wonderful. 

His  letters  show  a  vividness  and  a  theoretic  quality 
in  his  views  on  politics  which  are  very  rare  in  an 
Englishman.  At  times  this  meant,  as  it  did  with 
Disraeli,  a  very  sure  prescience  as  to  the  necessary 
consequences  of  events  whose  causes  he  recognized  so 
clearly ;  but  even  when  it  led  only  to  impromptu  and 
irresponsible  suggestions  it  made  his  writing  intensely 
stimulating.  The  following  comment  by  him  on  the 
prospects  of  English  Democracy  will  bring  this  quality 
of  his  mind  before  the  reader,  and  his  concluding 
sentence  suggests  the  wealth  of  thought  and  labour  he 
expended  on  this  and  kindred  topics. 

My  knowledge — such  as  it  is — informs  me  that  "  De- 
mocracy" has  never  lasted  a  whole  generation.  Ferrero's 
new  history  of  Rome  demonstrates  this.  When  an  oligarchy, 
based  on  war  and  farming,  perishes,  you  get  a  good  two 
generations,  or  three  generations  of  "  Roman  Equites."  The 
prudent  and  thoughtful  oust  the  political  militia.  But  they 
always  invoke  Democracy  after  thirty  or  sixty  years.  Then 
Democracy  develops  the  "  cry  "  and  the  "  caucus,"  and  so  dies, 
giving  place  to  Bureaucracy,  or  Csesarism,  or  a  combination 
of  the  two.  My  "  little  knowledge  "  tells  me  that  this  is  our 
disease.  But  my  astonishing — at  forty-seven  years  of  age — 
credulity  and  buoyant  animal  spirits  say  to  me,  "  Tush  ! 
The  English  will  do  something  that  no  one  else  has  done." 

If  it  were  possible  to  tell  one's  friends  all  that  one  thinks 
and  writes  and  does,  I  should  like  to  show  you  all  the 
memoranda  I  have  written  during  the  last  year.  But  that 
would  take  as  long  as  it  has  taken  to  play  my  part  in  this 
obscure  drama. 

In  his  writing,  as  in  his  conversation,  the  kaleido- 
scope of  his  mind  produced  such  surprising  pictures 
abruptly  succeeding  one  another,  that    I  hesitate  to 


GEORGE   WYNDHAM  93 

give  the  most  characteristic  instances,  for  the  reader 
has  not  the  opportunity  which  conversation  affords  of 
learning  by  cross-examination  how  fully  thought-out 
were  trains  of  reasoning,  which  he  suggested  without 
developing  them,  or  how  real  was  the  connexion  in  his 
mind  between  things  objectively  poles  apart.  I  will 
content  myself  with  one — by  no  means  among  the 
strongest — which  shows  the  official  at  the  War  Office 
indulging  in  feelings  and  conceits  suggested  by  his 
surroundings.  That  office  has  had  in  the  last  twenty 
years  many  distinguished  occupants — Sir  Henry 
Campbell-Bannerman,  Mr.  Arnold-Forster,  Lord  Hal- 
dane,  Lord  Midleton,  Colonel  Seely,  and  others. 
But  it  is  safe  to  say  that  neither  the  old  premises 
in  Pall  Mall  nor  the  buildings  in  Whitehall  ever 
inspired  any  of  these  men  with  the  combination  of 
theories  and  emotions  to  which  the  following  letter 
gives  expression. 

After  a  day  spent  in  grappling  with  complicated  detail,  I 
find  that  nothing  short  of  philosophy  or  poetry  is  of  the  least 
use  to  me.  I  tried  a  novel  the  other  day,  The  Open 
Question,  and  it  aggravated  me  beyond  belief.  I  want  the 
very  best  and  prefer  it  in  a  different  form  and  remotely  aloof 
from  everyday  life.  I  have  bought  a  Latin  Prayer  Book — 
our  Prayer  Book,  2nd  ed.,  1574 — and  find  the  Psalms  very 
stately  and  soothing.  A  little  Latin  goes  a  long  way.  But 
when  your  business  consists  in  ploughing  like  a  liner  through 
seas  of  slipshod  English,  you  need  the  very  opposite :  a 
dead  language,  clean-cut  and  frigid  poetry,  or  abstract 
thought.  .  .  . 

I  have  been  inside  a  good  many  machines ;  the  Army, 
Irish  Office,  Colonial  Expansion  j  Fleet  Street ;  literary 
coteries,  and  now  inside,  and  of,  another  office  ;  and  no  doubt 
such  experience  affects  me.  The  multiplicity  of  the  parts 
defying  philosophic  comprehension  and  the  dead  weight  of 


94  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

each  dragging  down  individual  energy,  drive  home  the  lesson 
that  no  individual,  or  race,  or  age,  or  movement  embracing 
many  nations  and  some  centuries,  is  likely  to  give  a  decisive 
cast  to  the  direction  of  development  or  even  to  reconcile  any 
considerable  number  of  divergent  forces.  But  this  does  not 
daunt  me.  I  see  the  universal  Flux  :  but  I  believe  in  the 
choric  Dance.  In  some  ways  business  is  a  capital  exercise  or 
drill.  It  gives  you  a  number  of  occasions  every  day  for 
doing  the  right  thing  in  the  right  way.  This  is  capital 
practice.  But  far  from  thinking  that  mere  honest  effort  at 
complicated  jobs  would  serve  mankind  as  a  substitute  for 
philosophy,  religion  and  art,  I  do  not  believe  that  the  second- 
class  clerks  could  work  as  they  do  if  we  had  not  all  the 
abstract  speculations  of  3000  years  behind  us.  We  either 
draw  inspiration  ourselves,  or  else  we  imitate  others  who 
drew  it,  from  the  half-truths  arrived  at  by  lonely  thinkers. 

But,  my  goodness  !  how  much  more  of  courage  and  com- 
passion and  patience  and  sincerity  is  needed  if  the  world  is 
to  go  any  better  than  it  has  done  !  And  what  is  to  be  done 
for  the  people  who  are  outside  the  worlds  of  thought  and  of 
action  ?  For  the  young  lady  who  lost  her  temper  last  week 
because  she  was  not  invited  [to  a  party],  or  for  the  officer 
who  resigns  his  commission  when  his  profession  interferes 
with  his  shooting  ? 

All  these  extracts  tell  of  the  active,  seething 
imagination  of  the  man.  But  he  could  write  of 
politics  in  a  very  concrete  and  practical  vein.  I  must 
not,  however,  cite  letters  dealing  with  topics  of  acute 
political  controversy  which  might  provoke  discussions 
that  would  distract  attention  from  the  real  matter  in 
hand.  I  will  confine  myself  to  quoting  a  long  and 
closely  reasoned  letter  on  the  attempts  of  1906  at 
a  compromise  on  the  education  question — attempts 
which  he  regarded  as  profoundly  illogical. 

I  am  deeply  concerned  over  the  so-called  Education  Com- 
promise.    It  makes  me  sad  to  feel  how  remote  I  am  from 


GEORGE    WYNDHAM  95 

my  countrymen,  and  how  remote  they  are— with  all  their 
excellent  qualities — from  the  rudiments  of  philosophic  thought. 
It  is  dear  of  them  to  jump  at  a  compromise,  but  silly  to  jump 
before  looking.  They  will  look  afterwards.  They  will  look 
back  and  say,  "If  we  had  only  known."  Yet  they  do  not 
realize  that  they  preclude  themselves  from  knowing  now — or 
ever — owing  to  their  inveterate  distrust  of  thinking.  Any 
man  who  thinks  on  these  occasions,  and  shows  that  he  is 
thinking,  is  suspect.  I  am  suspect.  But  I  must  think  ;  and 
I  will  believe  that  it  is  wise  to  do  so.  Yet  I  am  nearly 
powerless.  I  thought  and  spoke  on  Wednesday.  T/ie  Times 
suppressed  my  speech.  The  Morning  Post  published  a  sketch 
of  the  rest,  and  suppressed  all  that  I  said  on  education. 

.  .  .  Will  you  help  me  to  make  them  see  before  the 
smash  that  there  are  only  two  ways  of  approaching  the  pro- 
blem ?  (1)  To  start  from  uniformity  of  religious  instruction  ; 
and  (2)  to  start  from  unity  of  the  national  system  of  educa- 
tion. Or,  putting  it  another  way,  (1)  To  start  from  a  neutral 
religion  ;  and  (2)  to  start  from  the  neutrality  of  the  State  to 
all  religions. 

From  whichever  point  you  make  your  departure,  you 
must — I  admit  and  assert — make  illogical  exceptions  to  fit  in 
with  present  practical  needs. 

But — and  here  is  the  whole  matter — if  you  start  from  a 
fair  theory,  cela  ne  peche  pas  par  la  base.  No  wrecker  can  find  a 
cranny  in  your  foundation,  insert  his  crow-bar,  and  overthrow 
the  whole  edifice. 

If,  on  the  other  hand,  you  start  from  an  unfair  theory — as 
this  bill  does — no  amount  of  charity  and  ingenuity  is  of  any 
avail. 

Here  it  is,  in  the  black  and  white  of  Clause  I.,  that  the 
State's  imprimatur  is  to  be  affixed  only  on  undenominational 
teaching.  If  once  you  say  that,  "  contracting  out "  is  a  neces- 
sary consequence.  You  may  mitigate  its  secular  evils  by 
lavish  grants ;  but  you  cannot  eradicate  the  stigma.  It 
makes  me  sad  and  sick.  Think  of  the  irony  of  the  situation. 
On  Tuesday  the  House  of  Commons,  by  5  to  1,  supported  a 
motion  in  favour  of  relieving  Roman  Catholics  from  important, 
but  largely  sentimental,  grievances.     The  accession  oath,  the 


96  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

prohibition  on  the  appointment  of  a  Roman  Catholic  Lord- 
Lieutenant  of  Ireland  or  Lord  Chancellor  are  grievances. 
They  are  antiquated  insults  and  irrational  disabilities.  We 
said  so  on  Tuesday  by  5  votes  to  1.  Yet,  because  English- 
men will  not,  or  cannot,  think,  on  Thursday,  in  the  same  week, 
within  forty-eight  hours,  we  say  by  nearly  2\  votes  to  1,  that 
new  disabilities — not  sentimental  and  antiquated,  but  modern 
and  practical — are  to  be  imposed  in  respect  of  education  for 
all  the  Catholic  youth  in  the  country. 

Nothing  can  wholly  amend  that  original  defect. 
But  the  Bill  has    been   "guillotined."      Clause   I.    goes 
through  automatically  on  Monday. 

I  deplore,  but  accept  perforce,  that  situation. 
What  really  kills  me  is  that  your  people  and  our  people, 
who  want  to  be  kind,  can't  think  enough  to  gauge  the  con- 
sequences of  that  initial  mistake. 

They  say,  "  If  the  Government  makes  the  grant  big 
enough,  what  does  it  matter  ? "  They  say  that  because  they 
will  not,  or  cannot,  think.     Help  me  to  make  them  think. 

On  their  own  absurd  basis,  this  Bill  is  valueless  unless  it 
is  a  settlement.     Very  well. 

(1)  The  cost  of  education  has  increased,  is  increasing,  and 
will  increase. 

Consequently,  any  fixed  grant  which  is  fair  to-day  will  be 
unfair  next  year,  grossly  unfair  in  five  years,  and  utterly  use- 
less in  ten  years.  Therefore,  instead  of  haggling  for  six- 
pences, they  must  insist  on  paying  only  a  quota  for  the  rights 
of  citizenship.  They  must  say,  "  We  think  it  unfair  to  pay 
rates  for  your  religion.  We  think  it  sad  to  be  excluded 
from  your  national  system  of  education,  and  bad  for  that 
system.  But  you  will  have  it  so.  How  much  are  we  to  pay  ? 
Isn't  a  shilling  in  the  pound  enough  ?  We  have  300,000 
Catholic  children.  A  child's  education  costs  about  £3  a 
head.  Is  not  900,000  shillings — .£45,000  a  year — a  sufficient 
tax  on  our  religious  convictions  ? " 

Supposing  that  the  House  sees  the  force  of  that — i.e.  that 
for  a  permanent  settlement  the  private  contribution  must  be  a 
quota,  and  not  a  fixed  grant — then  point  out:  II.  Popula- 
tion increases.     When  new  schools  are  wanted,  you  must  give 


GEORGE    WYNDHAM  97 

us  building  grants  for  the  same  proportion  of  19  :  1.  If  we 
need  ,£20,000  for  new  schools,  you  must  pay  .£19,000,  and  we 
will  find  £1000. 

I  don't  know  why  I  trouble  you  with  all  this. 

At  this  moment  I  feel  as  if  I  lived  in  a  community  of 
deaf  men.  The  more  I  talk  the  more  worried  they  look  .  .  . 
and  nothing  happens. 

The  letter  is  a  long  one,  but  I  must  allow  myself 
to  quote  its  extremely  characteristic  conclusion  : — 

Let  us  quit  all  this  hopeless,  helpless  dumb  show  of  hyp- 
notized Democracy  going  to  its  appointed  doom  of  Bureau- 
cracy and  Caesarism,  now  as  ever,  and  everywhere  —  quod 
semper  et  ubique. 

Let  us  laugh  !  We  ought  to  laugh.  Surprise  is  the  basis 
of  laughter.  And  what  can  be  more  surprising  than  to  see 
the  leaders  of  Nonconformity  in  the  House  of  Commons, 
bribed  by  Baronetcies,  abrogating  the  Constitution,  and 
laughing — as  well  they  may — at  the  spectacle  of  the  Anglican 
Archbishop  ramming  Nonconformity  down  my  throat  with 
the  butt  end  of  his  crozier  ?  They  laugh.  Had  I  not  better 
laugh,  too  ?  "  Taking  it  in  good  part "  is,  I  believe,  the 
classic  phrase  for  acquiescing  in  comic  turpitude. 

But  I  have  not  quitted  this  grim  subject.  I  must,  or  I 
shall  forget  to  laugh,  and  increase  the  merriment  of  others  by 
getting  angry.  That  would  be  absurd,  when  neither  Anglican, 
nor  Catholic,  nor  Educationalist,  nor  Unionist,  are  willing  to 
think  of  anything  but  their  Christmas  holidays. 

A  word  must  be  said  of  Wyndham's  interest  in 
religious  subjects  which,  in  later  years,  was  marked. 
His  interest  in  the  education  question  was  indeed 
but  one  instance  of  this.  The  early  cult  of  beauty 
which  was  natural  to  his  artist's  nature  had  in  it, 
perhaps,  a  touch  of  paganism.  Later  on,  the  beauty 
of  Catholic  ideals  drew  him.    He  wrote  well  and  even 

H 


98  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

profoundly  on  the  practical  necessity  of  dogma  in 
order  to  safeguard  religion. 

He  was  one  of  a  group  of  persons  interested  in  the 
philosophy  of  religion,  who  in  1896  founded  the 
Synthetic  Society.  Wyndham  and  the  present  writer 
were  for  a  time  its  honorary  secretaries,  and  among 
our  colleagues  were  Mr.  Arthur  Balfour,  the  present 
Lord  Haldane,  Mr.  Henry  Sidgwick,  Dr.  Talbot,  now 
Bishop  of  Winchester,  Father  Tyrrell,  Baron  von 
Hugel,  Sir  Alfred  Lyall,  and  Sir  Oliver  Lodge,  as 
well  as  two  veterans  who  had  helped  to  found  the  old 
Metaphysical  Society  in  1869,  namely  R.  H.  Hutton 
and  Dr.  Martineau.  I  name  those  who  most  regularly 
attended  our  early  meetings. 

Wyndham  took  but  little  part  in  the  formal  debates, 
but  in  conversation  at  the  small  dinners  which  preceded 
them  he  was  often  very  brilliant,  and  the  topics  dis- 
cussed by  the  Society  set  him  thinking.  The  follow- 
ing defence  of  dogma,  called  forth  by  an  Essay  written 
by  one  of  our  members,  is  surely  a  remarkable  piece 
of  tersely  expressed  reasoning. 

I  have  read  X.  and  should  like  to  discuss  him  with  you. 
He  writes  with  lucidity  and  persuasion.  But  there  is  a  third 
position  between  his  and  Sabatier's.  A  man  may  accept 
Sabatier's  view  that  the  relation  of  dogma  to  religion  is  best 
illustrated  by  the  relation  of  language  to  thought,  and  may, 
yet,  attach  an  importance  to  dogma  so  great  as  to  justify  him 
in  accepting  a  convinced  believer's  attitude  towards  dogma  as 
the  only  adequate  recognition  of  the  magnitude  of  that  im- 
portance. Even  in  literature  we  decline  to  bring  Shakespeare 
or  Chaucer  "  up  to  date  "•:  we  prefer,  if  we  can,  to  read  Dante 
or  Homer,  however  haltingly,  in  their  own  Tuscan  and  Greek. 
I  heard  an  interesting  sermon  by  Adderley  to-day,  in  which 
he  justified  the  acceptance  of  the  "  Real  Presence "  and  the 
rejection   of  "  transubstantiation."     It  would   have   made  a 


GEORGE    WYNDHAM  99 

good  point  of  departure  for  a  symposium.  His  point  was  that 
the  doctrine  of  Transubstantiation  was  only  an  explanation 
of  the  dogma  of  the  Real  Presence  given,  necessarily,  in  the 
terms  of  philosophy  then  current  but  now  obsolete.  Adderley 
would  no  doubt  argue  that,  in  such  a  case,  the  relation  of 
dogma  to  religion  may  not  only  be  illustrated  by  the  relation 
of  language  to  thought,  but  that  it  actually  is  more  a  ques- 
tion of  language  than  of  belief.  Carrying  that  backwards  to 
Sabatier's  extreme  position,  my  supporter  of  a  tertium  quid 
would  handle  the  Incarnation  on  similar  lines.  He  would  say 
that  in  the  birth  of  our  Lord  there  was  a  manifestation  of 
Divinity  on  Earth  so  momentous  and  so  singular  as  to  find  an 
adequate,  though  no  doubt  inaccurate  expression,  only  in  the 
doctrine  of  the  Incarnation.  No  other  form  of  thought  would 
give  him  a  sufficiently  splendid  symbol,  he  would  therefore 
accept  that  form  of  thought  whilst  admitting  that  in  thought 
and  still  more,  of  course,  in  language  it  partook  of  human 
thought  and  human  language  belonging  to  the  age  in  which 
it  was  conceived  and  to  the  ages  during  which  it  was  crystal- 
lized. But,  just  because  he  makes  that  philosophic  conces- 
sion, he  could  and  would  see  much  gain  in  keeping  to  the 
form  both  of  thought  and  language  and  much  risk  in  any 
ephemeral  attempt  to  re-think  and  re-write  the  symbol. 

Some  of  the  opponents  of  dogma  amused  him,  as 
he  shows  in  the  following  note  of  1906 : 

I  have  a  letter  before  me  from  a  man  who  holds  that 
dogmatic  teaching  of  the  Christian  or  any  other  religion  is 
immaterial.  He  would  teach  the  religion  of  citizenship.  This 
turns  out  to  be  the  teaching  of  boys  not  to  spit  in  public 
places. 

There  were  seasons  when  Catholic  ideals  strongly 
affected  his  life,  and  he  welcomed  the  Catholic  revival 
in  the  Church  of  England ;  but  perhaps  his  sym- 
pathies in  this  matter  somewhat  outstripped  his 
convictions. 

There  were  very  noble  and  winning  traits  in  a 


ioo  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

character  not  wholly  consistent.  Though  intensely 
ambitious,  he  had  that  devotion  to  great  aims  for  their 
own  sake  which  deliberately  sacrifices  ambition.  If 
going  to  Ireland  satisfied  his  ambition,  his  line  of 
action  after  he  was  installed  went  at  times  in  the  teeth 
of  his  own  interests.  He  studied  before  all  things 
what  was  best,  not  for  himself,  but  for  the  country. 
He  refused  to  adopt  opportunist  courses  which  would 
have  benefited  him  personally  and  averted  disaster. 
He  declined,  as  has  been  said,  offers  of  official  pro- 
motion, preferring  what  only  his  sanguine  and 
absorbing  devotion  to  the  task  he  had  set  himself 
prevented  his  seeing  to  be  a  forlorn  hope. 

And  when  resignation  of  his  office  was  inevitable, 
and  he  felt  himself  to  be  left  almost  alone,  no  word  of 
reproach  was  ever  heard  from  him.     He  sadly  quoted 
to  one,  near  to  him  by  friendship  and  relationship, 
Chaucer's  lines  : 

Let  not  this  wretched  woe  your  herte'  grieve 
But  manly  set  the  world  in  six  and  seven, 
And  if  thou  die  a  martyr,  go  to  Heaven. 

He  was  indeed  loyal  in  his  friendships,  and  would 
do  impulsive  things  for  his  friends  such  as  are  done 
by  the  Don  Quixotes  of  the  world,  but  very  seldom 
by  those  whose  lot  is  cast  in  the  cold  calculating 
atmosphere  of  public  life.  Life  in  the  great  world  is 
apt  to  wear  off  such  finer  promptings.  They  are 
keen  in  many  a  boy.  Wyndham  was  something  of  a 
boy  to  the  end.  His  boyish  love  of  the  glittering 
toys  of  life  made  him  enjoy  the  glamour  of  the  great 
world  ;  but  the  same  youthfulness  kept  untarnished 
much  of  the  generous  and  uncalculating  spirit  which 
that  world  is  apt  to  kill. 


GEORGE    WYNDHAM  101 

This  generosity,  while  it  was  graceful  in  his  friend- 
ships, might  even  verge  on  the  heroic  in  its  other 
aspect  of  which  I  have  just  spoken — his  devotion  to 
public  causes.     He  could  lose  himself  in  his  cause. 
And  his  heart  would  be  so  much  set  on  its  success 
that  defeat  became  tragic.     Here  I  return  to  the  note 
I  touched  at  starting — the  element  of  real  greatness 
revealed  mainly  in  his  failures.     The  average  man  of 
the  world  held  it  to  show  a  want  of  the  tough  fibre  of 
a  work-a-day  statesman  that  he  nearly  broke  his  heart 
when  he  had   finally  to  give  up  his   Irish  schemes. 
Many  of  his  critics  saw  no  more  than  this,  and  were 
incapable  of  understanding  that  Wyndham's  unhap- 
piness  was  largely  the  result  of  a  depth  of  conviction 
and  a  concentrated  devotion  by  which  alone  the  very 
greatest  things  are  done.     In  a  lesser  degree  his  keen 
sense    of  inevitable   consequences    and   his   genuine 
patriotism  made  him  suffer  acutely  in    other   public 
defeats — notably  in  August,    191 1,  when  the   Parlia- 
ment Bill  was  passed.     Weeks  of  ungrudging  labour 
with  results  that  made  him  intensely  sanguine  were 
succeeded   by  the   rebuff   of  August    10th.     To    a 
mechanical  mind  the  depth  of  his  disappointment  at 
that  time  might  seem  extravagant.     But  it  stood  for  a 
fine   quality  of  insight  and  a  public   spirit  which  is 
especially  rare   in  our  Lown  day.     And   these   allied 
him  on  one  side  with  the  confessors  and  with  the  men 
of  genius. 

All  this  must  be  remembered  in  trying  to  think  of 
him  as  he  really  was.  The  estimate  of  kindly  but 
undiscerning  public  opinion  will  not  suffice.  We 
must  add  to  it 

...  all  the  world's  coarse  thumb 
And  finger  failed  to  plumb. 


io2  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

And  these  lines  of  Browning  are  followed  by  others 
which  give  truly  the  same  aspect  of  Wyndham's 
nature — the  aspect  that  told  of  genius  and  made  for 
tragedy.  Of  Wyndham,  if  of  any  one,  it  is  true  that 
he  was  haunted  by  a  crowd  of  thoughts  and  hopes 
which  in  the  nature  of  the  case  could  never  have  been 
realized,  and  which  yet  stamped  him  as  something 
apart  from  the  many  : 

Thoughts  hardly  to  be  packed 

Into  a  narrow  act, 

Fancies  that  broke  through  language  and  escaped ; 

All  I  could  never  be, 

All/  men  ignored  in  me ; 

This,  was  I  worth  to  God,  whose  wheel  the  pitcher  shaped. 

While  then  the  obituary  writers  pictured  him  as 
the  gallant  knight,  graceful,  brilliant,  accomplished,  I 
prefer  to  think  of  that  side  of  him — a  very  real  side — 
which  allies  him  with  those  who  have  worked  and 
suffered  for  great  causes,  the  extent  and  quality  of 
whose  labour  has  been  only  half  recognized,  who  have 
seen  enough  to  know  sadly  how  little  actual  life  fulfils 
the  highest  dreams  which  come  to  men  in  moments  of 
illumination.  Let  this  thought  be  set  down  in  his 
own  words  which  stand  before  me  in  his  own  hand- 
writing. They  are  headed  "  Illumination,"  and  they 
run  thus  : 

To  have  known  this  once  :  and  so  to  take  our  part 

With  the  great  masters  who  have  left  behind 

No  miniature  perfections  of  their  art ; 

But  one  vast  work,  unfinished  and  unsigned, 

That  should  have  told  the  secret  of  their  heart, 

And  tells  of  hands  grown  old,  and  eyes  worn  blind. 

But  a  record  of  one  who  loved  Browning's  brave 
boast  that  he  would  H  greet  the  Unseen  with  a  cheer," 


GEORGE    WYNDHAM  103 

must  not  conclude  on  such  a  note  as  this,  though  it  is 
the  deepest  and  truest.  To  the  end  Wyndham  was 
full  of  hope,  full  of  purpose.  If  he  stumbled  it  was  to 
rise  again  and  work  in  new  fields.  And  I  will  con- 
clude by  quoting  words  of  keenness  as  to  the  future, 
written  only  a  month  before  he  was  taken  away.  His 
newly  inherited  property  gave  him  a  congenial  field  of 
work.  And  here  the  whole  instrument  was  under  his 
own  control,  as  it  could  never  be  in  the  political  field 
of  a  democracy.  For  the  moment  he  dreamed  of  it 
as  giving  him  full  scope  for  the  future,  while  the 
possibilities  of  his  beautiful  library  fed  his  literary 
imagination.  It  is  not  at  all  likely  that  he  would 
have  given  up  politics  as  his  letter  hints.  But  his 
habit  of  absorbing  himself  in  what  he  worked  at 
probably  made  it  a  necessity  to  think  of  the  task 
directly  before  him  as  the  one  thing  that  was  worth 
while  and  was  to  occupy  his  future  time. 

For  myself — apart  from  politics,  finance,  and  the  round  of 
duty — I  am  absorbed  in  two  subjects:  Rural  England  and 
my  library.  "  We  know  what  we  are,  but  we  know  not  what 
we  may  be."  I  may,  perhaps,  take  office  again.  But  I 
doubt  it.  Inveni  portum.  My  work,  I  am  almost 
persuaded,  must  be  to  tackle  the  problem  of  Rural  England  ; 
and  my  play,  I  am  convinced,  to  finish  my  library.  The  two 
together  would  give  me  happy  and  useful  employment  for 
twenty  years. 

I  am  attacking  "Rural  England"  (1)  by  action,  based 
on  study  of  the  past — from  Domesday  Book  onwards — and 
on  modern  science— "so  called."  I  think  best  in  action  and 
experiment.  So  I  have  given  the  go-by  to  theory  and  have 
already  pumped  water  several  miles  over  considerable  hills  ; 
built  cow-sheds  ;  bought  a  motor-trolley  to  supersede  four 
cart-horses,  and  done  much  else  which  will,  I  believe,  put 
back  this  bit  of  England  to  where  it  stood  in  the  seventeenth 


104  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

century  and  afford  working  models  to  [those]  who  lack  my 
capital  and  imagination.     It  is  jolly  work. 

(2)  But  I  attack  "  Rural  England "  also  with  my  pen 
and  have  written  a  "  private "  essay  that  has  been  "  highly 
commended  "  by  Lansdowne  and  Milner. 

As  for  my  play  ...  I  have  finished  the  structure  of  the 
library  and  nearly  filled  it  with  books.  There  are  six  desks 
for  people  who  mean  business.  It  is  inspired  by  Wells, 
Merton,  San  Marco  at  Florence,  etc.  But  [it]  will  be  a  place 
at  the  top  of  the  house  in  which  you  and  X.  and  I  and  others 
can  read  and  write.  Party  Politics  leave  me  cold.  But  the 
countryside  of  England  and  the  literature  of  Europe  make 
me  glow.  .  .  . 

Incidentally  to  the  two  main  purposes  of  my  life,  I  am 
finishing  a  chapel  in  the  basement. 

It  is  exhilarating  to  make  things  yourself.  The 
carpenter  and  I,  without  architect  or  contract,  have  made  the 
library,  the  chapel,  the  new  cow-farm  and  much  else.  When 
I  told  X.  a  few  weeks  ago  that  this  would  be  my  work  and 
not  party  politics,  he  was  shocked.  But  after  seeing  what  I 
was  at  he  came  round  to  my  view.  Some  people  inherit  an 
estate  and  go  on  as  if  nothing  had  happened.  I  can't  do 
that.  My  father  never  told  me  anything  about  this  place.  I 
lived  and  worked  in  Cheshire  and  Ireland  ;  suddenly  I  find 
myself  responsible  for  farming  myself  2400  acres,  and  for 
paying  sums  that  stagger  me  by  way  of  weekly  wages  and 
repairs.  So  I  ask  myself,  "  What  are  you  going  to  do  ?  "  I 
mean  to  use  all  my  imagination  and  energy  to  get  something 
done  that  shall  last  and  remind. 


IV 


MR.   CHESTERTON   AMONG  THE 
PROPHETS 

Ever  since  Mr.  Chesterton  began  to  be  prominent  the 
present  writer  has  had  frequent  discussions  with  his 
friends  on  the  nature  and  extent  of  his  gifts.  And  it 
is  curious  that  the  books  of  one  man  should  provoke 
such  opposite  judgments  in  his  readers.  Setting  aside 
the  epithet  "brilliant,"  which  seems  allowed  on  all 
hands,  the  difference  is  very  complete.  The  critics 
from  whom  I  dissent  speak  of  his  thought  as 
"  superficial "  ;  I  find  it  penetrating.  They  talk  of 
him  as  asking  us  to  believe  impossible  paradoxes. 
I  find  him  pre-eminently  the  propounder  of  the 
maxims  of  common-sense — of  maxims  and  principles 
so  clearly  true  when  they  are  stated  that  they  might 
be  called  truisms.  They  regard  him  as  primarily  a 
purveyor  of  acrobatic  feats  of  the  intellect — exciting 
and  enjoyable,  as  any  amusing  "  show  "  is  enjoyable, 
but  not  to  be  taken  seriously.  I  have  found  him, 
before  all  things,  quick  to  defend  truths  of  great 
practical  moment,  and  the  effective  opponent  of 
plausible  and  misleading  theories — a  very  serious 
and  important  role.  They  class  him  with  brilliant 
writers  of  the  hour,  who  have  no  claim  to  teach 
the   age  a   serious   lesson   or   to   doing    more    than 


io6  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

interest  us  in  their  own  whims  and  prejudices  by 
stating  them  with  lucidity  and  enforcing  them  with 
telling  epigrams.  I  associate  him  with  those  writers 
of  the  past  who  have  decried  mere  ingenuity  in 
theorizing,  and  striven  to  find  the  path  of  philosophy 
traced  by  Nature  herself.  I  class  his  thought — 
though  not  his  manner — with  that  of  such  men  as 
Burke,  Butler,  and  Coleridge.  When  his  work  on 
Orthodoxy  appeared,  it  seemed  to  me  a  triumphant 
and  irrefragable  confutation  of  their  view ;  I  found 
it  regarded  by  them  as  a  confutation  of  mine. 

The  proverb  which  begins  with  the  words  de 
gustibus  is  an  old  one.  I  should  not  discuss  further 
a  view  I  do  not  share,  but  that  it  appears  to  me 
(who  am  not,  of  course,  an  impartial  judge)  that  I 
do  see  the  qualities  in  Mr.  Chesterton's  work  which 
have  made  such  critics  take  their  view,  but  that  they 
do  not  see — hardly  even  look  for — those  which  have 
made  me  take  mine.  And  while  the  former  qualities 
are  at  all  events  reconcilable  with  my  view,  the  latter 
are  not  so  with  theirs.  If  this  is  so,  I  may  claim  a 
victory  on  the  ground  of  De  Maistre's  aphorism : 
"  Truth  can  understand  error,  but  error  cannot  under- 
stand truth." 

Let  me  take  Orthodoxy  as  a  basis  for  illustrating 
the  above  statement.  If  any  one  opens  it  with  a 
predisposition  to  take  what  I  may  call  the  frivolous 
view  of  Mr.  Chesterton,  he  will  find  in  skimming  its 
pages  plenty  to  confirm  such  a  view.  "How  can  I 
take  a  man  seriously,"  he  will  say,  "who  gives  as  the 
primary  fact  in  all  his  philosophy  the  belief  he  has 
ever  had  in  fairies l ;  who  laughs  at  conscience 
and  the  'inner  voice,'  and  tells  you  that  'the  most 

1  Page  85. 


MR.    CHESTERTON  AMONG    THE  PROPHETS        107 

horrible  of  all  horrible  religions  is  the  worship  of 
the  God  within ' ■ ;  who  is  so  little  alive  to  the 
history  of  all  civilizations,  except  the  Chinese,  as  to 
say  that  there  is  in  the  world  '  no  tradition  of 
progress  ' 2 ;  who  tells  us  that  if  we  credit  any  devia- 
tion from  fixed  law  (and,  of  course,  even  free  will 
is  a  deviation  from  fixed  law),  the  most  stupendous 
miracle  is  as  easy  of  belief  as  the  smallest ;  who 
takes  his  metaphors  from  taxicabs  and  tramcars  in 
Battersea  ;  from  the  Inner  Circle  trains  and  Gower 
Street  Station  and  the  like — nay,  who  devotes  half  a 
page  to  explaining  that  seriousness  is  not  a  virtue, 
and  that  one  should  not  take  oneself  seriously  at  all ; 
that  seriousness,  moreover,  is  easy  but  undesirable  ? 
If  such  a  man  sums  up  on  the  side  of  obscurantism 
and  against  modern  thought,  it  is  just  what  was  to  be 
expected — it  is  all  one  huge  paradox.  He  does  not 
at  bottom  really  believe  what  he  says,  or  expect 
others  to  believe  him.  To  unravel  and  refute  his 
arguments  is  not  worth  while.  It  is  as  little  worth 
while  as  to  analyze  the  fallacies  in  Whately's  proof 
that  Napoleon  I.  never  existed." 

This  way  of  looking  at  the  book  might  be 
elaborated  and  illustrated  much  more  fully.  In  main- 
taining that  it  is  a  false  way  I  must  begin  by  admitting 
that  one  statement  of  Mr.  Chesterton's  is  not  serious, 
namely,  that  in  which  he  seems  to  say  that  he  is  not 
to  be  taken  seriously.  This  starting-point,  which  is 
mine,  is  at  all  events  as  fair  as  that  of  his  critics.  It 
is  a  case  of  assumption  for  assumption.  They  assume 
that  he  is  mainly  frivolous ;  I  that  he  is  intensely  in 
earnest.  To  them — starting  with  their  assumption — 
all   the   brilliant   epigrams  with   which   Orthodoxy  is 

1  Page  136.  s  Page  266. 


io8  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

packed  from  start  to  finish,  seem  to  be  extraordinary 
feats  of  intellectual  agility — the  renewal,  under  nine- 
teenth-century conditions,  of  the  dialectical  tourna- 
ments of  the  thirteenth  :  and  in  those  tournaments 
it  rejoiced  a  skilled  disputant  to  have  to  defend  what 
was  neither  probable  nor  true,  as  it  gave  all  the  more 
scope  for  his  ingenuity.  To  me — starting  with  mine 
— this  aspect  of  ingenious  paradox  appears  simply 
accessory.  I  regard  it  partly  as  a  concession,  which 
has  become  habitual  on  the  part  of  the  writer,  to  the 
taste  of  an  age  which  loves  to  be  amused  and  hates 
being  bored.  It  is  the  administration  of  intellectual 
stimulants,  or  the  application  to  a  lethargic  and  tired 
and  rather  morbid  world  of  a  tremendous  shower 
bath,  in  order  to  brace  it  and  renew  its  normal 
activities.  The  net  result,  however,  of  Mr.  Chesterton's 
awakening  treatment  is  not  mere  stimulating  paradox, 
but,  rather,  a  douche  of  startling  common-sense. 

I  shall  attempt  in  the  following  observations,  first, 
to  justify  the  claim  I  make  for  Mr.  Chesterton's  book 
that  it  is  a  contribution  of  very  high  utility  to  religious 
thought,  and  then  to  examine  his  mannerisms — which 
on  the  one  hand  may  be  said  to  impair  the  dignity 
of  his  writing,  and  sometimes  discredit  as  mere  para- 
doxes the  truths  he  has  at  heart,  but  on  the  other 
hand  certainly  make  the  book  racy  and  stimulating. 

Mr.  Chesterton  disclaims  novelty  for  his  views. 
His  disclaimer  is  just,  in  the  sense  that  in  religious 
thought,  as  Macaulay  said  sixty  years  ago,  the  funda- 
mental arguments  on  either  side  are  unchangeable. 
For  the  most  part,  "  What  is  new  is  not  true,  and 
what  is  true  is  not  new."  But  that  kind  of  novelty 
which  is  afforded  by  fresh  vividness  and  reality  given 
to  old  truths  we  find  most  signally  in  Mr.  Chesterton's 


MR.   CHESTERTON  AMONG   THE   PROPHETS        109 

pages.  Novel,  it  may  be,  his  views  are  not.  Original 
in  him  they  most  certainly  are.  He  tells  us,  indeed, 
that  he  has  never  read  the  chief  Christian  apologetic 
writings  at  all.  He  has  discovered  his  arguments  for 
himself,  and  herein  lies  half  the  interest  and  value  of 
his  book.  It  is  the  record  of  the  past  experience  of 
one  who  was  brought  up  amid  influences  which  made 
him  an  Agnostic,  and  was  converted  to  Christianity. 
The  depth  of  the  Christian  philosophy  met  the 
difficulties  of  an  active  and  penetrating  mind  that  had 
again  and  again  found  the  shibboleths  of  typical 
modern  speculative  thinkers  incoherent,  mutually 
destructive,  or  even  self-destructive. 

Again,  his  views  are  original  in  their  mode  of 
presentment.  "  It  is  the  very  triumph  of  originality," 
writes  a  great  religious  thinker,  "not  to  invent  or 
discover  what  is  perhaps  already  known,  but  to  make 
old  things  read  as  if  they  were  new,  from  the  novelty 
of  aspect  in  which  they  are  placed.  This  faculty  of 
investing  with  associations,  of  applying  to  particular 
purposes,  of  deducing  consequences,  of  impressing  on 
the  imagination  is  creative."  Some  of  Mr.  Chester- 
ton's most  striking  pages  are  an  exposition  of  argu- 
ments already  used  by  well-known  writers.  We  find, 
for  instance,  Butler's  argument — urged  in  his  sermons 
— on  the  adaptation  of  human  nature  to  the  Christian 
virtues.  We  find  illustrations  of  Tertullian's  testi- 
monium animce  naturaliter  christians.  I  do  not  say 
that  Mr.  Chesterton  gives  us  again  all  that  Tertullian 
and  Butler  have  given  us.  But  in  his  record  of  the 
way  in  which  these  arguments  presented  themselves 
to  him,  and  of  the  way  they  drove  out  modern  theories 
too  shallow  to  stand  against  them,  we  have  most 
timely  evidence  of  the  ever-living  power  of  thoughts 


no  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

not  themselves  new.  And  we  often  get  a  sight  of 
aspects  hitherto  overlooked,  and  yet  most  wholesome 
for  the  times.  Again,  when  he  mercilessly  demolishes 
the  confused  thought  which  treats  mathematical 
necessity  and  scientific  uniformity  as  equally  unalter- 
able in  the  nature  of  things,  he  is  saying  over  again 
what  W.  G.  Ward  and  Dr.  McCosh  said  fifty  years 
ago  in  answer  to  John  Stuart  Mill ;  yet,  in  Mr. 
Chesterton's  context  and  in  the  record  of  the  place 
which  these  arguments  held  in  his  own  mental  history, 
there  is  an  actuality  and  point  which  was  necessarily 
absent  from  more  formal  disquisitions.  So,  too,  with 
Mr.  Chesterton's  most  important  contention  against 
naturalism,  that  reason  cannot  be  the  highest  product 
of  the  evolution  of  merely  non-rational  forces — that 
there  must  be  reason  behind  the  process — we  have 
an  argument  made  familiar  to  our  own  generation  by 
Mr.  Arthur  Balfour's  books  and  Archbishop  Temple's 
Bampton  Lectures ;  yet  in  Mr.  Chesterton  it  is 
original.  So,  too,  is  the  view  of  scepticism  as  the 
suicide  of  thought — though  its  main  argument,  in- 
cluding the  metaphor  of  the  sceptical  thinker  sawing 
off  the  branch  on  which  he  sits,  is,  of  course,  familiar. 
In  each  case  we  have  all  the  drama  of  personal  con- 
viction and  history — and,  in  addition,  the  extraordinary 
richness  and  copiousness  of  illustration  in  which  Mr. 
Chesterton  is  unrivalled. 

Of  the  occasional  grotesqueness  of  his  illustrations 
I  will  speak  later  on.  But,  whatever  may  be  said  in 
criticism  of  this  attribute,  their  cogency  is  unimpaired 
or  even  enhanced  by  it.  And,  after  all,  in  a  civiliza- 
tion in  which,  among  the  most  highly  educated, 
religious  scepticism  is  nearly  as  common  as  it  was  in 
the  Roman  Empire  of  the  first  century  of  our  era, 


MR.    CHESTERTON  AMONG    THE  PROPHETS        m 

this  is  what  matters  most.  In  some  instances  old 
arguments  come  upon  us  in  these  pages  with  a  new 
force  which  is  almost  startling. 

The  net  result  of  the  book  and  its  rationale 
appear  to  me — to  put  it  briefly — to  be  the  help  it 
gives  us  in  substantiating'the  following  position,  which 
it  is  not  to  Mr.  Chesterton's  purpose  to  draw  out. 
Cardinal  Newman  has  written  with  keen  perception 
in  the  Apologia,  on  the  confusion  which  modern  investi- 
gations have  introduced  into  the  religious  views  of 
many  thoughtful  persons.  This  was  a  subject  on  which 
the  Cardinal  felt  strongly  long  before  the  danger  was 
generally  recognized  as  imminent.  He  referred  to  it  as 
early  as  1827,  in  the  first  of  his  University  Sermons 
— which  Mr.  Chesterton  has  probably  never  read, 
though  some  of  its  thoughts  appear  in  his  pages. 
This  confusion  has  led  many  to  abandon  Christianity 
and  to  return  to  the  old  work  of  formulating  original 
philosophies  of  life.  The  effect  Mr.  Chesterton's 
work  had  on  the  present  writer  was  not  to  diminish 
his  sense  of  the  difficulties  of  which,  perhaps,  Mr. 
Chesterton,  in  his  sense  of  victory,  makes  too  light ; 
but  to  bring  into  relief  the  shallowness  of  thinkers 
who  have  allowed  new  difficulties  in  detail  to  lead  to 
doubts  of  Christianity  itself. 

Mr.  Chesterton  brings  out  forcibly  the  depth  of 
those  elements  in  the  Christian  view  of  life  which 
modern  difficulties  leave  untouched,  and,  consequently, 
the  weakness  of  those  who  have  so  lightly  set  it  aside. 
He  brings  home  to  us  also  the  impotence  of  in- 
dividualism to  find  any  substitute  comparable  to  the 
corporate  faith  it  is  destroying.  We,  who  are  brought 
up  Christians,  may  reflect  on  some  of  the  primary 
sources  of  the  life-giving  power  of  our  religion  as  little 


H2  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

as  we  reflect  on  the  air  we  breathe.     They  are  too 
much  a  matter  of  course  to  be  noticed.     But  the  story 
of  one  who  was  brought  up  without  Christian  faith, 
felt  profoundly  the  want  of  it  and  the  incoherence  of 
its  substitutes,  and  had  the  earnestness  and  activity  of 
mind  to  formulate  for  himself  many  of  its  underlying 
principles, — which  by  ourselves  are  merely  practically 
taken  for  granted  and  partly  acted  on  without  being 
explicitly    recognized, — makes     us    recognize    these 
principles  explicitly.    It  brings  into  relief,  most  valuable 
for  our  own  times,  the  profound  answers  Christianity 
has  already  given  to  profound  difficulties.     Men  like 
Tatian  and  St.  Justin  gave  the  same  personal  testi- 
mony to  the  full  depth  of  the  Christian  message  in 
the  early  days  of  our  era.     But  their   task  was  far 
more  obvious,  for  the  Empire  was  pagan.     It  is  just 
because  we  feel  we  know  Christianity  so  well  that  we 
risk,  in  some  sort,  ceasing  to  know  it.    Great  thoughts, 
through   becoming  stale  and  mechanical,  may  be  as 
little  helpful  to  our  own  civilization  as  to  a  civilization 
to  which  they  were  unfamiliar.     Their  being  too  old 
may  be  as  much  against  their  general  influence  as 
their  being  too  young.     To  see  them  strike  with  all 
the  force  of  youth  on  a  gifted  mind  makes  them  young 
again   to    us.     Thus  the  spectacle   of  this   intensely 
active  and  earnest  modern  intellect,  with  all  its  array 
of  paradox   and   quaint  conceit,  with  its   disdain   of 
conventionality,  its  wilful  indulgence  in  exaggeration, 
its  streaks  of  irreverent   imagination    thrown   across 
deeply  reverent  thoughts,  its  occasional  exhibition  of 
honest     Philistine     human    nature    unrestrained    by 
fastidious    taste — the    spectacle,    in    short,    of     Mr. 
Chesterton's  whole,  forcible,  energizing  self,  with  its 
strength  and  its  defects,  fired  by  the  Christian  dogma 


MR.  CHESTERTON  AMONG   THE  PROPHETS        113 

and  ethics,  as  though  he  had  lived  in  the  days  of  Nero 
or  Marcus  Aurelius,  is  just  the  tonic  which  a  jaded 
generation  needs.  And  it  reminds  us  how  much  that 
is  indispensable  in  the  inheritance  of  Christendom  our 
own  age  has  ceased  adequately  to  realize  and  is  in 
danger  of  lightly  abandoning. 

Mr.  Chesterton  is  impatient  with  modern  thought 
— sometimes  even  unfair  to  it — but  often  exhibits 
its  weaknesses  with  the  skill  of  a  logical  detective. 
One  point  on  which  he  insists  is  the  profound  answer 
already  given  by  Christianity  to  a  profound  difficulty 
which  has  baffled  so  many  typical  modern  thinkers — 
optimists  and  pessimists  alike.  Christianity  recognizes 
existence  as  supremely  momentous,  and  the  human 
soul  as  of  supreme  value.  The  world  and  the  soul 
are,  for  the  Christian,  intensely  worth  working  for  and 
worth  improving.  Yet  Christianity  recognizes  to  the 
full  how  profound  is  the  need  of  improvement.  Thus 
we  have  the  two  great  motives  for  work  :  that  it 
is  sorely  needed  and  that  it  is  intensely  worth 
while. 

The  modern  thinkers  who  set  aside  the  Chris- 
tian view  lose  one  or  other  of  these  essential 
motives.  The  believers  in  a  mechanical  law  of 
progress  are  at  one  with  optimists  in  denying  the 
former  ;  the  pessimists  deny  the  latter — not  to  speak 
of  the  necessarians  who  deny  the  possibility  of  all 
effort  except  what  is  inevitable,  and  leave  us,  therefore, 
no   stimulus   at   all.     In   this  thought  alone — and  it 

D 

recalls  the  old  Agnosce  Christiane  dignitatem  tuam — 
we  have  a  contrast  between  Christianity  and  its 
modern  proposed  substitutes,  which  evidently  made 
the  acceptance  of  "orthodoxy"  to  Mr.  Chesterton  a 
veritable  emancipation.     It  is  but  one  of  the  many 

1 


ii4  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

sides  of  Christianity  in  which  he  found  wisdom  and 
help  towards  accepting  things  as  they  are,  and  seeing 
their  meaning  and  place  in  life ;  a  wisdom  tested  by 
the  ages  during  which  the  Christian  religion  has  been 
acted  on  by  the  whole  Church.  The  ingenious  con- 
jectures of  private  judgment,  on  the  other  hand,  are 
merely  personal,  untested  and  a  priori,  and  are  likely 
enough  to  change  with  each  clever  philosophy  which 
comes  before  the  mind. 

Mr.  Chesterton's  work  is,  as  I  have  said,  auto- 
biographical ;  and  while  I  must  leave  those  who 
would  master  the  whole  process  of  his  conversion 
to  what  he  terms  "orthodoxy" — that  is  to  Christi- 
anity with  a  strong  Catholic  bias — to  read  what  it 
would  take  too  long  to  summarize  here,  I  will  now 
proceed  to  give  and  to  illustrate  in  his  own  words 
some  main  steps  in  the  process. 

In  a  powerful  chapter  he  brings  before  us  the 
sense  which  early  possessed  him  of  the  utter  confusion 
introduced  by  "private  judgment,"  after  the  sixteenth- 
century  Reformation,  into  a  scheme  which  had  been 
profoundly  coherent.  This  confusion  resulted  not 
merely  from  the  collapse  of  many  Christian  beliefs, 
but  from  the  disintegration  and  loss  of  proportion 
consequent  on  the  rejection  of  Catholic  tradition. 
The  Christian  virtues  were  distorted  by  those  who 
did  not  deny  them.  And  this  process,  first  rendered 
possible  by  the  principles  of  the  Reformation,  has 
continued  to  our  own  time. 

Each  virtue  was  taken  up  by  some  individual  as  a 
hobby  and  exaggerated,  and  stripped  of  the  correctives 
which  Christian  tradition,  with  its  profound  sense  and' 
experience  of  the  nature  of  the  whole  man,  had 
supplied  to  such  exaggeration.    The  chapter  is  rightly 


MR.    CHESTERTON  AMONG    THE  PROPHETS        115 

called  the  "  Suicide  of  Thought,"  although,  at  first 
sight,  this  title  applies  only  to  the  portion  which  deals 
with  the  accompanying  sceptical  excesses  of  the 
intellect.  But  it  really  applies  equally  to  the  tendency 
of  virtues  to  run  to  absurd  excesses,  if  they  are  not 
checked  by  the  authority  of  the  Christian  Church — for 
such  excesses  are  due  to  the  one-sidedness  of  the  indi- 
vidual thinker.  Charity  is  allowed  to  run  riot  until  it 
becomes  so  fond  of  all  men  and  so  indulgent  to  them 
that  it  denies  the  reality  of  sin.  Modesty  and  humility 
are  Christian  virtues.  But  they  take  a  wrong  turn  in 
the  modern  sceptic,  and  make  him  so  modest  as  to 
doubt  of  his  own  power  to  be  sure  of  the  validity  of 
the  Divine  reason,  and  of  the  value  of  those  aims  and 
standards  which  are  the  very  condition  of  an  action  being 
worth  while.  Oppression  and  tyranny  among  those 
in  authority  have  ever  been  among  the  evils  against 
which  great  Christian  saints  have  protested,  but  the 
modern  critic  of  authority  here  again  runs  wild  and 
attacks  indiscriminately  the  uses  as  well  as  the  abuses 
of  authority.  In  point  of  fact,  there  is  a  profound 
principle  involved  in  the  action  of  authority,  even  in 
checking  the  human  reason.  It  checks  the  suicidal 
excesses  to  which,  in  fallen  man,  the  reasoning  faculty 
tends.  For  reason,  if  allowed  to  run  riot,  will,  as 
history  shows,  question  even  the  initial  faith  which 
makes  us  trust  its  own  validity.  Against  such  sceptical 
excesses  of  rationalism  authority  rightly  protests,  and 
in  doing  so  is  the  guardian  and  friend  of  reason  and 
not  its  opponent. 

Take  another  aspect  of  modern  excess — pragma- 
tism. Here  again  the  claim  to  believe  what  works 
well  and  fits  in  with  the  necessities  of  the  human 
mind    is   valid.      But    when    this    is    pressed    to    a 


Ii6  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

denial  of  objective  truth,  we  have  another  instance  of 
the  insistence  on  one  aspect  to  the  exclusion  of 
another  equally  necessary — for  the  sane  and  healthy 
human  reason  absolutely  demands  some  knowledge  of 
objective  truth. 

These  are  some  specimens  of  Mr.  Chesterton's 
illustrations  of  his  thesis — but  his  own  words  are  so 
forcible  that  I  proceed  to  give  them  : 

The  modern  world  is  not  evil ;  in  some  ways  the  modern 
world  is  far  too  good.  It  is  full  of  wild  and  wasted  virtues. 
When  a  religious  scheme  is  shattered  (as  Christianity  was 
shattered  at  the  Reformation),  it  is  not  merely  the  vices  that 
are  let  loose.  The  vices  are,  indeed,  let  loose,  and  they 
wander  and  do  damage.  But  the  virtues  are  let  loose  also ; 
and  the  virtues  wander  more  wildly,  and  the  virtues  do  more 
terrible  damage.  The  modern  world  is  full  of  the  old  Chris- 
tian virtues  gone  mad.  The  virtues  have  gone  mad  because 
they  have  been  isolated  from  each  other  and  are  wandering 
alone.  Thus  some  scientists  care  for  truth  ;  and  their  truth 
is  pitiless.  Thus  some  humanitarians  only  care  for  pity  ; 
and  their  pity  (I  am  sorry  to  say)  is  often  untruthful.  For 
example,  Mr.  Blatchford  attacks  Christianity  because  he  is 
mad  on  one  Christian  virtue  :  the  merely  mystical  and  almost 
irrational  virtue  of  charity.  He  has  a  strange  idea  that  he 
will  make  it  easier  to  forgive  sins  by  saying  that  there  are  no 
sins  to  forgive.  Mr.  Blatchford  is  not  only  an  early  Christian, 
he  is  the  only  early  Christian  who  ought  really  to  have  been 
eaten  by  lions.  For  in  his  case  the  pagan  accusation  is  really 
true  :  his  mercy  would  mean  mere  anarchy.  He  really  is  the 
enemy  of  the  human  race — because  he  is  so  human.  .  .  . 

.  .  .  Humility  was  largely  meant  as  a  restraint  upon  the 
arrogance  and  infinity  of  the  appetite  of  man.  He  was 
always  outstripping  his  mercies  with  his  own  newly-invented 
needs.  .  .  . 

But  what  we  suffer  from  to-day  is  humility  in  the  wrong 
place.     Modesty  has   moved    from   the   organ   of  ambition. 


MR.   CHESTERTON  AMONG    THE  PROPHETS        117 

Modesty  has  settled  upon  the  organ  of  conviction  ;  where  it 
was  never  meant  to  be.  A  man  was  meant  to  be  doubtful 
about  himself,  but  undoubting  about  the  truth  ;  this  has  been 
exactly  reversed.  Nowadays  the  part  of  a  man  that  a  man 
does  assert  is  exactly  the  part  he  ought  not  to  assert — him- 
self. The  part  he  doubts  is  exactly  the  part  he  ought  not  to 
doubt — the  Divine  Reason.  Huxley  preached  a  humility 
content  to  learn  from  Nature.  But  the  new  sceptic  is  so 
humble  that  he  doubts  if  he  can  even  learn.  Thus  we  should 
be  wrong  if  we  had  said  hastily  that  there  is  no  humility 
typical  of  our  time.  The  truth  is  that  there  is  a  real  humility 
typical  of  our  time  ;  but  it  so  happens  that  it  is  practically  a 
more  poisonous  humility  than  the  wildest  prostrations  of  the 
ascetic.  The  old  humility  was  a  spur  that  prevented  a  man 
from  stopping  ;  not  a  nail  in  his  boot  that  prevented  him 
from  going  on.  For  the  old  humility  made  a  man  doubtful 
about  his  efforts,  which  might  make  him  work  harder.  But 
the  new  humility  makes  a  man  doubtful  about  his  aims,  which 
will  stop  him  working  altogether.  .  .  . 

The  sages,  it  is  often  said,  can  see  no  answer  to  the  riddle 
of  religion.  But  the  trouble  with  our  sages  is  not  that  they 
cannot  see  the  answer  ;  it  is  that  they  cannot  even  see  the 
riddle.  They  are  like  children,  so  stupid  as  to  notice  nothing 
paradoxical  in  the  playful  assertion  that  a  door  is  not  a 
door.  The  modern  latitudinarians  speak,  for  instance,  about 
authority  in  religion  not  only  as  if  there  were  no  reason  for 
it,  but  as  if  there  had  never  been  any  reason  for  it.  Apart 
from  seeing  its  philosophical  basis,  they  cannot  even  see  its 
historical  cause.  Religious  authority  has  often,  doubtless, 
been  oppressive  or  unreasonable  ;  just  as  every  legal  system 
(and  especially  our  present  one)  has  been  callous  and  full  of 
cruel  apathy.  It  is  rational  to  attack  the  police  ;  nay,  it  is 
glorious.  But  the  modern  critics  of  religious  authority  are 
like  men  who  should  attack  the  police  without  ever  having 
heard  of  burglars.  For  there  is  a  great  and  possible  peril  to 
the  human  mind :  a  peril  as  practical  as  burglary.  Against 
it  religious  authority  was  reared,  rightly  or  wrongly,  as  a 
barrier.  And  against  it  something  certainly  must  be  reared 
as  a  barrier,  if  our  race  is  to  avoid  ruin. 


Ii8  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

The  peril  is  that  the  human  intellect  is  free  to  destroy 
itself.  Just  as  one  generation  could  prevent  the  very  exist- 
ence of  the  next  generation,  by  all  entering  a  monastery  or 
jumping  into  the  sea,  so  one  set  of  thinkers  can  to  some 
degree  prevent  further  thinking  by  teaching  the  next  genera- 
tion that  there  is  no  validity  in  human  thought.  It  is  idle  to 
talk  always  of  the  alternative  of  reason  and  faith.  Reason  is 
itself  a  matter  of  faith.  It  is  an  act  of  faith  to  assert  that 
our  thoughts  have  any  relation  to  reality  at  all.  If  you  are 
merely  a  sceptic,  you  must,  sooner  or  later,  ask  yourself  the 
question,  "  Why  should  anything  go  right ;  even  observation 
and  deduction  ?  Why  should  not  good  logic  be  as  mislead- 
ing as  bad  logic  ?  They  are  both  movements  in  the  brain  of 
a  bewildered  ape  ? "  The  young  sceptic  says,  "  I  have  a  right 
to  think  for  myself."  But  the  old  sceptic,  the  complete 
sceptic,  says,  "  I  have  no  right  to  think  for  myself.  I  have 
no  right  to  think  at  all." 

There  is  a  thought  that  stops  thought.  That  is  the  only 
thought  that  ought  to  be  stopped.  That  is  the  ultimate  evil 
against  which  all  religious  authority  was  aimed.  It  only 
appears  at  the  end  of  decadent  ages  like  our  own ;  and 
already  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells  has  raised  its  ruinous  banner ;  he 
has  written  a  delicate  piece  of  scepticism  called  Doubts  of 
the  Instrument.  In  this  he  questions  the  brain  itself,  and 
endeavours  to  remove  all  reality  from  all  his  own  assertions, 
past,  present  and  to  come.  But  it  was  against  this  remote 
ruin  that  ail  the  military  systems  in  religion  were  originally 
ranked  and  ruled.  The  creeds  and  the  crusades,  the  hier- 
archies and  the  horrible  persecutions,  were  not  organized,  as 
is  ignorantly  said,  for  the  suppression  of  reason.  They  were 
organized  for  the  difficult  defence  of  reason.  Man,  by  a 
blind  instinct,  knew  that  if  once  things  were  wildly  ques- 
tioned, reason  could  be  questioned  first.  The  authority  of 
priests  to  absolve,  the  authority  of  popes  to  define,  the  authority 
even  of  inquisitors  to  terrify :  these  were  all  only  dark  de- 
fences erected  round  one  central  authority,  more  undemon- 
strable,  more  supernatural  than  all — the  authority  of  a  man 
to  think.  We  know  now  that  this  is  so  ;  we  have  no  excuse 
for  not  knowing  it.     For  we  can  hear  scepticism  crashing 


MR.   CHESTERTON  AMONG   THE  PROPHETS        119 

through  the  old  ring  of  authorities,  and  at  the  same  moment 
we  can  see  reason  swaying  upon  her  throne.  In  so  far  as 
religion  has  gone,  reason  is  going.  For  they  are  both  of  the 
same  primary  and  authoritative  kind.  They  are  both 
methods  of  proof  which  cannot  themselves  be  proved.  And 
in  the  act  of  destroying  the  idea  of  divine  authority  we  have 
largely  destroyed  the  idea  of  that  human  authority  by  which 
we  do  a  long  division  sum.  With  a  long  and  sustained  tug 
we  have  attempted  to  pull  the  mitre  off  pontifical  man ;  and 
his  head  has  come  off  with  it.  .  .  . 

This  bald  summary  of  the  thought-destroying  forces  of 
our  time  would  not  be  complete  without  some  reference  to 
pragmatism  ;  for  though  I  have  here  used  and  should  every- 
where defend  the  pragmatist  method  as  a  preliminary  guide 
to  truth,  there  is  an  extreme  application  of  it  which  involves 
the  absence  of  all  truth  whatever.  My  meaning  can  be  put 
shortly  thus.  I  agree  with  the  pragmatists  that  apparent 
objective  truth  is  not  the  whole  matter ;  that  there  is  an 
authoritative  need  to  believe  the  things  that  are  necessary  to 
the  human  mind.  But  I  say  that  one  of  those  necessities 
precisely  is  a  belief  in  objective  truth.  The  pragmatist  tells 
a  man  to  think  what  he  must  think  and  never  mind  the 
Absolute.  But  precisely  one  of  the  things  he  must  think  is 
the  Absolute.  This  philosophy,  indeed,  is  a  kind  of  verbal 
paradox.  Pragmatism  is  a  matter  of  human  needs  ;  and  one 
of  the  first  of  human  needs  is  to  be  something  more  than  a 
pragmatist.  Extreme  pragmatism  is  just  as  inhuman  as  the 
determinism  it  so  powerfully  attacks.  The  determinist  (who, 
to  do  him  justice,  does  not  pretend  to  be  a  human  being) 
makes  nonsense  of  the  human  sense  of  actual  choice.  The 
pragmatist,  who  professes  to  be  specially  human,  makes  non- 
sense of  the  human  sense  of  fact. 

I  regret  that  space  will  not  allow  me  to  quote  the 
fine  criticism  in  this  connexion  passed  by  Mr. 
Chesterton  on  Renan  and  Anatole  France ;  some 
of  Mr.  Chesterton's  words  on  the  former  recalled  to 
the  present  writer  Archbishop  Alexander's  admirable 


T20  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

lines  of  forty  years  ago  on  the  joint  efforts  of  Strauss 
and  Renan  to  construct  a  Christ  whose  reality  would 
respond  to  all  the  tests  of  naturalism,  and  be  simply 
human  as  humanity  is  known  to  the  German  savant 
and  the  French  litterateur,  and  their  utter  failure  to 
produce  a  consistent  whole. 

Divinely  gentle,  yet  a  sombre  giant, 

Divinely  perfect,  yet  imperfect  man ; 
Divinely  calm,  yet  recklessly  defiant, 

Divinely  true,  yet  half  a  charlatan. 
They  torture  all  the  record  of  the  Life, 

Give  what  from  France  and  Germany  they  get ; 
To  Calvary  carry  the  dissecting  knife, 

Parisian  patchouli  to  Olivet. 

Mr.  Chesterton's  own  summary,  given  at  the  end 
of  this  remarkable  chapter,  is  at  once  brief  and 
forcible.  As  with  Christianity,  so  with  Christ,  even 
apart  from  actual  falsehood,  the  moderns  lose  all  sense 
of  proportion  and  of  the  greatness  of  the  whole.  The 
large  supernatural  sanity  of  the  Divine  figure  is  not 
seen,  for  it  is  broken  up  in  their  human  categories. 
Each  piece,  separate  from  the  whole  which  explains  it, 
becomes  not  sane  but  insane — and  therefore  unin- 
telligible as  a  guide  in  life : 

.  .  .  There  is  a  huge  and  heroic  sanctity  of  which  we 
moderns  can  only  collect  the  fragments.  There  is  a  giant  of 
whom  we  see  only  the  lopped  arms  and  legs  walking  about. 
They  have  torn  the  soul  of  Christ  into  silly  strips,  labelled 
egoism  and  altruism,  and  they  are  equally  puzzled  by  His 
insane  magnificence  and  His  insane  meekness.  They  have 
parted  His  garments  among  them,  and  for  His  vesture  they 
have  cast  lots  ;  though  the  coat  was  without  seam,  woven 
from  the  top  throughout. 


MR.   CHESTERTON  AMONG    THE   PROPHETS        121 

I  have  referred  above  to  Mr.  Chesterton's  criticism 
of  modern   pessimism.     I   think  that   it   formed    the 
turning-point   in   his  adoption   of  Christianity.      He 
rejected   pessimism,  but  he  was   no   optimist.      His 
acceptance   of    the   universe,    he    tells    us,    was   not 
optimism,  but  something  akin  to  the  loyalty  shown 
in  patriotism.     The  optimist  will  "defend  the  inde- 
fensible," he  will  be  "  the  jingo  of  the  universe,"  he 
will  be  "  less  inclined  to  the  reform  of  things,  more 
inclined  to  a  sort  of  front  bench  official  answer  to  all 
attacks,  soothing  every  one  with  assurances.     He  will 
not  wash  the  world,  but  whitewash  the  world."     This 
is    not    in   accordance   with    the   nature   of    things. 
Devotion  to  the  world,  as  to  one's  country,  should  not 
mean   a  false   contentment  which  denies   its   imper- 
fections.    Patriotism  should  first   show  itself  in  the 
effort  to  make  our  country  great,  not  in  a  passive, 
uncritical  assurance  that  she  is  already  perfect.    Rome 
became  great,  Mr.  Chesterton  reminds  us,  just  because 
men  loved  her  and  worked  for  her.     They  did  not,  in 
the   first  instance,   love  her  because  she  was  great. 
Here  again,  and  decisively,  Mr.  Chesterton  finds  the 
truth  in  regard  of  our  attitude  towards  the  universe 
in  the  Christian  ideal.     He   requires   a   love  of  the 
universe  as  passionate  as  that  of  the  optimist,  a  dis- 
satisfaction with  it  as  profound  as  that  of  the  pessimist. 
At  first  sight  this  appears  to  be  a  desire  for  incom- 
patible objects.     How  can  you  intensely  love  an  evil 
world  ?     Yet  if  the  world  be  good  enough  to  prompt 
intense  love,  how  can  it  inspire  the  passionate  zeal  of 
the   reformer  ?     Mr.    Chesterton    found   the   desired 
combination  in   Christianity.     It  was  God's  world  of 
men,  yet  man  had  fallen.     To  help  to  recover  the  lost 
ideal,  and  to  work  for  this  with  devotion,  similar  to 


122  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

that  which  makes  us  long  that  our  Fatherland  should 
fulfil  her  highest  possibilities — here  was  passionate 
love  without  optimism ;  intense  zeal  for  reform  and 
recognition  of  evil  without  pessimism. 

A  crucial  illustration  of  the  difference  between 
Christianity  and  pessimism  is  to  be  found  in  the 
Christian  attitude  towards  the  suicide  and  the  martyr 
respectively.  At  first  sight  the  two  would  seem  to  be 
similar.  Each  of  his  own  accord  gives  up  his  life. 
Modern  thinkers  have  tried  to  identify  them.  Such 
an  attempt  is  a  fresh  instance  of  their  carelessness  to 
probe  the  true  depths  of  Christian  sentiment.  For 
the  Christian,  the  two  men  are  not  only  not  the  same, 
but  they  are  poles  apart.  They  are  the  ideal  coward 
and  the  ideal  hero  respectively.  The  suicide  is  the 
exponent  in  action  of  sheer  pessimism — the  traditional 
stake  at  the  cross  roads  marking  his  grave  reminds  us 
that  he  has  committed  the  one  sin  unpardonable  by 
Christianity.  The  martyr,  on  the  other  hand,  is  the 
very  type  of  the  Christian  hero  ;  he  sacrifices  himself, 
even  his  life,  to  the  cause  of  the  Church — his  blood  is 
the  seed  of  Christianity.  This  thought  and  contrast 
I  have  never  seen  analyzed  so  subtly  as  it  is  in  Mr. 
Chesterton's  pages. 

Martyr  and  suicide  alike  care  little  for  life.  Yet 
in  the  carelessness  of  life  which  they  show  there  is  a 
difference  of  temper  and  motive  which  makes  one  the 
very  antithesis  of  the  other.  "  A  martyr  is  a  man 
who  cares  so  much  for  something  outside  him  that  he 
forgets  his  own  personal  life.  A  suicide  is  a  man  who 
cares  so  little  for  anything  outside  him  that  he  wants 
to  see  the  last  of  everything.  One  wants  something 
to  begin,  the  other  wants  everything  to  end."  This 
analysis  is  carried  further  and  deeper  elsewhere  in  the 


MR.    CHESTERTON  AMONG    THE  PROPHETS        123 

book.  Here  it  comes  as  the  culmination  of  the 
philosophy  which  calls  for  the  combination  which 
makes  life  and  effort  worth  while — the  recognition 
that  there  are  great  causes,  great  reforms  worth 
striving  for  in  the  world ;  great  evils,  and  some  great 
goal  to  be  attained  which  make  the  effort  to  reform 
them  intensely  worth  while. 

The  chapter  entitled  the  "  Paradoxes  of  Christi- 
anity "  contains,  perhaps,  the  most  valuable  writing  of 
the  whole  book,  and  indicates  the  general  line  of 
argument  on  which  Mr.  Chesterton  arrived  at  his 
convictions.  He  starts  with  the  expression,  after  his 
own  unconventional  and  forcible  manner,  of  the 
practical  way  in  which  conviction  is  reached ;  and 
here  again  he  has  rediscovered  the  path  already 
travelled  by  a  great  thinker.  For  he  gives  us  a 
rough  and  unphilosophical  expression  of  the  line  of 
reasoning  in  a  book  which  he  has,  perhaps  never  read 
— Cardinal  Newman's  Essay  in  Aid  of  a  Grammar  of 
Assent.  He  tells  us,  in  popular  language,  that  it  is 
by  the  cumulative  argument,  by  the  '*  illative  sense," 
which  cannot  express  all  the  latent  reasons  which 
influence  its  decision,  that  he,  like  others,  really 
reached  his  conclusions : 

...  A  man  is  not  really  convinced  of  a  philosophic 
theory  when  he  finds  that  something  proves  it.  He  is  only 
really  convinced  when  he  finds  that  everything  proves  it. 
And  the  more  converging  reasons  he  finds  pointing  to  this 
conviction,  the  more  bewildered  he  is  if  asked  suddenly  to 
sum  them  up.  Thus,  if  one  asked  an  ordinary  intelligent 
man,  on  the  spur  of  the  moment,  "  Why  do  you  prefer  civiliza- 
tion to  savagery?"  he  would  look  wildly  round  at  object 
after  object,  and  would  only  be  able  to  answer  vaguely : 
■  Why,  there  is  that  bookcase  .  .  .  and  the  coals  in  the  coal- 
scuttle .  .  .  and  pianos  .  .  .  and  policemen."     The  whole  case 


124  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

for  civilization  is  that  the  case  for  it  is  complex.  It  has  done 
so  many  things.  But  that  very  multiplicity  of  proof  which 
ought  to  make  reply  overwhelming  makes  reply  impossible. 

And  then  we  come  to  direct  autobiography — so 
interesting  and  pertinent  that  it  must  be  quoted ;  yet 
it  is  far  too  long  to  be  quoted  in  full : 

All  I  had  hitherto  heard  of  Christian  theology  had 
alienated  me  from  it.  I  was  a  pagan  at  the  age  of  twelve, 
and  a  complete  agnostic  by  the  age  of  sixteen  ;  and  I  cannot 
understand  any  one  passing  the  age  of  seventeen  without 
having  asked  himself  so  simple  a  question.  I  did,  indeed, 
retain  a  cloudy  reverence  for  a  cosmic  deity  and  a  great 
historical  interest  in  the  founder  of  Christianity.  But  I  cer- 
tainly regarded  Him  as  a  man.  ...  I  never  read  a  line  of 
Christian  apologetics.  I  read  as  little  as  I  can  of  them  now. 
It  was  Huxley  and  Herbert  Spencer  and  Bradlaugh  who 
brought  me  back  to  orthodox  theology.  They  sowed  in  my 
mind  my  first  wild  doubts  of  doubt.  Our  grandmothers  were 
quite  right  when  they  said  that  Tom  Paine  and  the  free- 
thinkers unsettled  the  mind.  They  do.  They  unsettled 
mine  horribly.  The  rationalists  made  me  question  whether 
reason  was  of  any  use  whatever ;  and  when  I  had  finished 
Herbert  Spencer  I  got  as  far  as  doubting  (for  the  first  time) 
whether  evolution  had  occurred  at  all.  As  I  laid  down  the 
last  of  Colonel  Ingersoll's  atheistic  lectures,  the  dreadful 
thought  broke  across  my  mind :  "  Almost  thou  persuadest 
me  to  be  a  Christian."     I  was  in  a  desperate  way. 

Mr.  Chesterton  proceeds  to  summarize  first  the 
contradictory  charges  made  against  Christianity : 

Thus  certain  sceptics  wrote  that  the  great  crime  of  Chris- 
tianity had  been  its  attack  on  the  family ;  it  had  dragged 
women  to  the  loneliness  and  contemplation  of  the  cloister, 
away  from  their  homes  and  their  children.  But,  then,  other 
sceptics  (slightly  more  advanced)  said  that  the  great  crime  of 
Christianity  was  forcing  the  family  and  marriage  upon  us ; 


MR.   CHESTERTON  AMONG   THE  PROPHETS        125 

that  it  doomed  women  to  the  drudgery  of  their  homes  and 
children,  and  forbade  them  loneliness  and  contemplation. 
The  charge  was  actually  reversed.  Or,  again,  certain  phrases 
in  the  Epistles  or  the  Marriage  Service  were  said  by  the  anti- 
Christians  to  show  contempt  for  woman's  intellect.  But  I 
found  that  the  anti-Christians  themselves  had  a  contempt  for 
woman's  intellect ;  for  it  was  their  great  sneer  at  the  Church 
on  the  Continent  that  "  only  women  "  went  to  it.  Or,  again, 
Christianity  was  reproached  with  its  naked  and  hungry 
habits ;  with  its  sackcloth  and  dried  peas.  But  the  next 
minute  Christianity  was  being  reproached  with  its  pomp  and 
its  ritualism  ;  its  shrines  of  porphyry  and  its  robes  of  gold. 
It  was  abused  for  being  too  plain  and  for  being  too  coloured. 

But  then,  too,  the  men  of  science  accused  Christi- 
anity of  being  a  "light,"  confined  at  first  to  one 
people,  and  not  common  to  all.  This  was  immoral 
favouritism.  Yet  science  itself,  like  Christianity,  has 
originated  in  a  few,  and  was  never  extended  to  all. 
Such  is  the  necessary  history  of  all  higher  knowledge, 
of  which  the  chosen  and  gifted  few  are  the  pioneers. 
In  view  of  such  careless  and  flimsy  attacks,  Mr. 
Chesterton  began  to  think  that,  in  the  opinion  of  its 
critics,  "any  stick  was  good  enough  to  beat  Christi- 
anity with."  There  was  something  in  the  temper  of 
the  attacks  on  Christianity  which  looked  suspicious, 
over  and  above  their  inconclusiveness.  Perhaps,  after 
all,  the  unreason  and  eccentricity  were  on  the  side  of 
its  assailants,  the  sanity  and  common-sense  on  the 
side  of  Christianity  itself. 

.  .  .  Perhaps,  after  all,  it  is  Christianity  that  is  sane  and 
all  its  critics  that  are  mad — in  various  ways.  .  .  .  The  modern 
man  thought  Becket's  robes  too  rich  and  his  meals  too  poor. 
But  then  the  modern  man  was  really  exceptional  in  history  ; 
no  man  before  ever  ate  such  elaborate  dinners  in  such  ugly 
clothes.  .  .  .  The  fact  that   Swinburne  was  irritated  at  the 


126  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

unhappiness  of  Christians,  and  yet  more  irritated  at  their  hap- 
piness, was  easily  explained.  It  was  no  longer  a  complication 
of  diseases  in  Christianity,  but  a  complication  of  diseases  in 
Swinburne.  The  restraints  of  Christians  saddened  him 
simply  because  he  was  more  hedonist  than  a  healthy  man 
should  be.  The  faith  of  Christians  angered  him  because  he 
was  more  pessimist  than  a  healthy  man  should  be. 

Yet  in  this  suggestion,  Mr.  Chesterton  is  conscious 
of  something  wanting.  The  moderation  of  sanity, 
the  common-sense  of  mere  humdrum  human  nature, 
was  not  characteristic  of  Christianity.  And  here,  by 
a  gradual  process,  we  see  Mr.  Chesterton  rising  to  the 
conception  of  its  supernatural  character — to  something 
answering  to  intense  feeling  in  man,  something  not 
fathomable  or  reducible  to  complete  logical  consistency 
by  our  finite  intellects,  but  on  the  contrary  presenting 
mysteries  and  paradoxes  to  us,  who  see  through  a 
glass  darkly.  This  view  we  see  gradually  unfolding 
itself  in  these  pages — never,  perhaps,  adequately 
analyzed,  yet  throughout  implied.  Only  our  relations 
to  another  world  can  remove  the  constant  check 
imposed  by  reason  on  man's  deepest  feelings  and 
aspirations,  when  he  follows  exclusively  the  common- 
sense  maxims  of  this  world.  This  world  is  not 
adequate  to  our  self-realization.  Man  cannot  be 
explained  apart  from  his  relations  to  God  and  the 
truths  of  faith.  Logic  stands  aside  where  mystery 
begins ;  and  adoration  and  self-abasement  take  its 
place.  Intense  feeling  is  justified  in  a  sphere  in 
which  logic  cannot  without  a  divine  revelation  reach 
the  facts.  We  have  the  Man -God  as  the  culminating 
dogma ;  the  "  frenzy  "  of  the  crusader  is  the  type  of 
the  feeling  which  becomes  reasonable  in  view  of  truths 
so  far  above  reason.     The  sanity  of  Christianity  had 


MR.   CHESTERTON  AMONG    THE   PROPHETS         127 

in  it  as  much  "  frenzy  "  as  belongs  to  insanity,  but  it 
responded  to  supernatural  facts  and  not  to  illusions. 

Nevertheless  it  could  not,  I  felt,  be  quite  true  that  Chris- 
tianity was  merely  sensible  and  stood  in  the  middle.  There 
was  really  an  element  in  it  of  emphasis  and  even  frenzy 
which  had  justified  the  secularists  in  their  superficial  criticism. 
It  might  be  wise,  I  began  more  and  more  to  think  that  it  was 
wise,  but  it  was  not  merely  worldly  wise ;  it  was  not  merely 
temperate  and  respectable.  Its  fierce  crusaders  and  meek 
saints  might  balance  each  other  ;  still  the  crusaders  were  very 
fierce  and  the  saints  were  very  meek,  meek  beyond  all 
decency.  Now  it  was  just  at  this  point  of  the  speculation 
that  I  remembered  my  thoughts  about  the  martyr  and  the 
suicide.  In  that  matter  there  has  been  this  combination 
between  two  almost  insane  positions  which  yet  somehow 
amounted  to  sanity.  This  was  just  such  another  contradic- 
tion ;  and  this  I  had  already  found  to  be  true.  This  was 
exactly  one  of  the  paradoxes  in  which  sceptics  found  the 
creed  wrong;  and  in  this  I  had  found  it  right.  Madly  as 
Christians  might  love  the  martyr  or  hate  the  suicide,  they 
never  felt  these  passions  more  madly  than  I  had  felt  them 
long  before  I  dreamed  of  Christianity.  Then  the  most  diffi- 
cult and  interesting  part  of  the  mental  process  opened,  and  I 
began  to  trace  this  idea  darkly  through  all  the  enormous 
thoughts  of  our  theology.  The  idea  was  that  which  I  had 
outlined  touching  the  optimist  and  the  pessimist ;  that  we 
wanted  not  an  amalgam  or  compromise,  but  both  things  at 
the  top  of  their  energy  ;  love  and  wrath  both  burning.  Here 
I  shall  only  trace  it  in  relation  to  ethics.  But  I  need  not 
remind  the  reader  that  the  idea  of  this  combination  is  indeed 
central  in  orthodox  theology.  For  orthodox  theology  has 
specially  insisted  that  Christ  was  not  a  being  apart  from  God 
and  man,  like  an  elf,  nor  yet  a  being  half  human  and  half 
not,  like  a  centaur,  but  both  things  at  once  and  both  things 
thoroughly,  very  man  and  very  God. 

This  character  of  great  opposites  in  Christian 
belief  is  further  brought  out  in  the  following  passage 


128  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

on  the  greatness  and  littleness  of  man  according  to 
the  Christian  view  of  life : 

The  average  pagan,  like  the  average  agnostic,  would 
merely  say  that  he  was  content  with  himself,  but  not  inso- 
lently self-satisfied,  that  there  were  many  better  and  many 
worse,  that  his  deserts  were  limited,  but  he  would  see  that  he 
got  them.  In  short,  he  would  walk  with  his  head  in  the  air, 
but  not  necessarily  with  his  nose  in  the  air.  This  is  the 
manly  and  rational  position,  but  it  is  open  to  the  objection 
we  noted  against  the  compromise  between  optimism  and 
pessimism — the  "  resignation  "  of  Matthew  Arnold.  Being  a 
mixture  of  two  things,  it  is  a  dilution  of  two  things  ;  neither 
is  present  in  its  full  strength  or  contributes  its  full  colour. 
This  proper  pride  does  not  lift  the  heart  like  the  tongue  of 
trumpets  ;  you  cannot  go  clad  in  crimson  and  gold  for  this. 
On  the  other  hand,  this  mild  rationalist  modesty  does  not 
cleanse  the  soul  like  fire  and  make  it  clear  like  crystal ;  it 
does  not  (like  a  strict  and  searching  humility)  make  a  man  as 
a  little  child,  who  can  sit  at  the  feet  of  the  grass.  It  does 
not  make  him  look  up  and  see  marvels  ;  for  Alice  must  grow 
small  if  she  is  to  be  Alice  in  Wonderland.  Thus  it  loses 
both  the  poetry  of  being  proud,  and  the  poetry  of  being 
humble.  Christianity  sought  by  this  same  strange  expedient 
to  save  both  of  them. 

It  separated  the  two  ideas  and  then  exaggerated  them 
both.  In  one  way  Man  was  to  be  haughtier  than  he  had 
ever  been  before  ;  in  another  way  he  was  to  be  humbler  than 
he  had  ever  been  before.  In  so  far  as  I  am  Man  I  am  the 
chief  of  creatures.  In  so  far  as  I  am  a  man  I  am  the  chief  of 
sinners.  All  humility  that  had  meant  pessimism,  that  had 
meant  man  taking  a  vague  or  mean  view  of  his  whole  destiny 
— all  that  was  to  go.  We  were  to  hear  no  more  the  wail  of 
Ecclesiastes  that  humanity  had  no  pre-eminence  over  the 
brute,  or  the  awful  cry  of  Homer  that  man  was  only  the  sad- 
dest of  all  the  beasts  of  the  field.  Man  was  a  statue  of  God 
walking  about  the  garden.  Man  had  pre-eminence  over  all 
the  brutes  ;  man  was  only  sad  because  he  was  not  a  beast, 
but  a  broken  god.     The  Greek  had  spoken  of  men  creeping 


MR.   CHESTERTON  AMONG   THE  PROPHETS         129 

on  the  earth,  as  if  clinging  to  it.  Now  Man  was  to  tread  on 
the  earth  as  if  to  subdue  it.  Christianity  thus  held  a  thought 
of  the  dignity  of  man  that  could  only  be  expressed  in  crowns 
rayed  like  the  sun  and  fans  of  peacock  plumage.  Yet  at  the 
same  time  it  could  hold  a  thought  about  the  abject  smallness 
of  man  that  could  only  be  expressed  in  fasting  and  fantastic 
submission  in  the  grey  ashes  of  St.  Dominic  and  the  white 
snows  of  St.  Bernard.  When  one  came  to  think  of  ones  self, 
there  was  vista  and  void  enough  for  any  amount  of  bleak 
abnegation  and  bitter  truth.  There  the  realistic  gentleman 
could  let  himself  go,  as  long  as  he  let  himself  go  at  himself. 
There  was  an  open  play-ground  for  the  happy  pessimist. 
Let  him  say  anything  against  himself  short  of  blaspheming 
the  original  aim  of  his  being  ;  let  him  call  himself  a  fool,  and 
even  a  damned  fool  (though  that  is  Calvinistic) ;  but  he  must 
not  say  that  fools  are  not  worth  saving.  He  must  not  say 
that  a  man,  qua  man,  can  be  valueless.  Here  again,  in 
short,  Christianity  got  over  the  difficulty  of  combining  furious 
opposites,  by  keeping  them  both,  and  keeping  them  both 
furious.  The  Church  was  positive  on  both  points.  One  can 
hardly  think  too  little  of  one's  self.  One  can  hardly  think 
too  much  of  one's  soul ! 

The  greatness  of  the  soul  and  the  great  scale  on 
which  Christianity  exercised  our  feelings  of  wrath  and 
of  pity  were  out  of  keeping  with  a  view  of  life  which 
contemplated  no  more  than  what  this  world  alone 
shows  to  us : 

.  .  .  The  spirits  of  indignation  and  of  charity  took  terrible 
and  attractive  forms,  ranging  from  that  monkish  fierceness 
that  scourged  like  a  dog  the  first  and  the  greatest  of  the 
Plantagenets,  to  the  sublime  pity  of  St.  Catherine,  who,  in  the 
official  shambles,  kissed  the  bloody  head  of  the  criminal. 
Poetry  could  be  acted  as  well  as  composed.  The  heroic  and 
monumental  manner  in  ethics  has  entirely  vanished  with 
supernatural  religion.  They,  being  humble,  could  parade 
themselves  ;  but  we  are  too  proud  to  be  prominent.     Our 

K 


130  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

ethical  teachers  write  reasonably  for  prison  reform  ;  but  we 
are  not  likely  to  see  Mr.  Cadbury,  or  any  eminent  philan- 
thropist, go  into  Reading  Gaol,  and  embrace  the  strangled 
corpse  before  it  is  cast  into  the  quicklime.  Our  ethical 
teachers  write  mildly  against  the  power  of  millionaires  ;  but 
we  are  not  likely  to  see  Mr.  Rockefeller,  or  any  modern 
tyrant,  publicly  whipped  in  Westminster  Abbey. 

In  truth,  this  combination  of  love  and  wrath, 
gentleness  and  fierceness,  was  a  characteristic  note  of 
Christianity.  Each  aspect  represented  something  great 
in  our  nature.  And  Christianity  alone  showed  how 
the  two  could  be  combined  in  their  fullest  intensity  : 

.  .  .  The  real  problem  is — Can  the  lion  lie  down  with  the 
lamb  and  still  retain  his  royal  ferocity  ?  That  is  the  problem 
the  Church  attempted ;  that  is  the  miracle  she  achieved.  .  .  . 
Those  underrate  Christianity  who  say  it  discovered  mercy  ; 
any  one  might  discover  mercy.  In  fact,  every  one  did.  But 
to  discover  a  plan  for  being  merciful  and  also  severe — that 
was  to  anticipate  a  strange  need  of  human  nature.  .  .  . 

.  .  .  Any  one  might  say,  "  Neither  swagger  nor  grovel "  ; 
and  it  would  have  been  a  limit.  But  to  say,  "  Here  you 
can  swagger,  and  there  you  can  grovel " — that  was  an 
emancipation. 

This  was  the  big  fact  about  Christian  ethics  ;  the  dis- 
covery of  the  new  balance.  Paganism  had  been  like  a  pillar 
of  marble,  upright  because  proportioned  with  symmetry. 
Christianity  was  like  a  huge  and  ragged  and  romantic  rock, 
which,  though  it  sways  on  its  pedestal  at  a  touch,  yet,  because 
its  exaggerated  excrescences  balance  each  other,  is  enthroned 
there  for  a  thousand  years.  In  a  Gothic  cathedral  the 
columns  were  all  different,  but  they  were  all  necessary. 
Every  support  seemed  an  accidental  and  fantastic  support ; 
every  buttress  was  a  flying  buttress.  So  in  Christendom 
apparent  accidents  balanced.  Becket  wore  a  hair  shirt  under 
his  gold  and  crimson,  and  there  is  much  to  be  said  for  the 
combination  ;   for  Becket  got  the  benefit  of  the  hair  shirt, 


MR.    CHESTERTON  AMONG    THE  PROPHETS        131 

while  the  people  in  the  street  got  the  benefit  of  the  crimson 
and  gold.  It  is,  at  least,  better  than  the  manner  of  the 
modern  millionaire,  who  has  the  black  and  drab  outwardly 
for  others,  and  the  gold  next  his  heart.  But  the  balance  was 
not  always  in  one  man's  body  as  in  Becket's  ;  the  balance 
was  often  distributed  over  the  whole  body  of  Christendom. 

One  more  extract  shall  be  given,  in  which  we  see 
Mr.  Chesterton  casting  his  eye  along  the  story  of  the 
early  centuries  of  our  era,  and  noting  with  the  eyes 
of  a  Christian  poet  what  he  calls  the  Romance  of 
Orthodoxy.  He  notes  the  spectacle  of  the  Church, 
the  great  war-chariot  of  Christ  or  His  war  horses, 
driven  with  infinite  skill  and  avoiding  the  excesses  of 
heresy  on  either  side.  The  passage  is  as  characteristic 
as  anything  in  the  volume,  marked  by  real  inspiration 
and  imagination,  yet  touched — in  this  case  only  slightly 
— by  the  unconventional  colloquialism  which  we  must 
put  up  with,  for  it  is  part  of  the  Chestertonian  style 
which  is  the  man  : 

.  .  .  People  have  fallen  into  a  foolish  habit  of  speaking  of 
orthodoxy  as  something  heavy,  humdrum  and  safe.  There 
never  was  anything  so  perilous  or  so  exciting  as  orthodoxy. 
It  was  sanity :  and  to  be  sane  is  more  dramatic  than  to  be 
mad.  It  was  the  equilibrium  of  a  man  behind  madly-rushing 
horses,  seeming  to  stoop  this  way  and  to  sway  that,  yet  in 
every  attitude  having  the  grace  of  statuary  and  the  accuracy 
of  arithmetic.  The  Church  in  its  early  days  went  fierce  and 
fast  with  any  war  horse  ;  yet  it  is  utterly  unhistoric  to  say 
that  she  merely  went  mad  along  one  idea,  like  a  vulgar 
fanaticism.  She  swerved  to  right  and  left,  so  as  exactly  to 
avoid  enormous  obstacles.  She  left  on  one  hand  the  huge 
bulk  of  Arianism,  buttressed  by  all  the  worldly  powers  to 
make  Christianity  too  worldly.  The  next  instant  she  was 
swerving  to  avoid  an  orientalism,  which  would  have  made  it 
too  unworldly.     The  orthodox  Church  never  took  the  tame 


132  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

course  or  accepted  the  conventions ;  the  orthodox  Church  was 
never  respectable.  It  would  have  been  easier  to  have  ac- 
cepted the  earthly  power  of  the  Arians.  It  would  have  been 
easy,  in  the  Calvinistic  seventeenth  century,  to  fall  into  the 
bottomless  pit  of  predestination.  It  is  easy  to  be  a  madman  : 
it  is  easy  to  be  a  heretic.  It  is  always  easy  to  let  the  age 
have  its  head ;  the  difficult  thing  is  to  keep  one's  own.  .  .  . 
It  is  always  simple  to  fall ;  there  are  an  infinity  of  angles  at 
which  one  falls,  only  one  at  which  one  stands.  To  have  fallen 
into  any  one  of  the  fads,  from  Gnosticism  to  Christian 
Science,  would,  indeed,  have  been  obvious  and  tame.  But  to 
have  avoided  them  all  is  one  whirling  adventure ;  and  in  my 
vision  the  heavenly  chariot  flies  thundering  through  the  ages, 
the  dull  heresies  sprawling  and  prostrate,  the  wild  truth 
reeling  but  erect. 

I  have  quoted  enough,  I  think,  to  justify  me  in 
my  emphatic  assertion  that  Mr.  Chesterton  is  to  be 
taken  seriously.  Yet  he  may  be  taken  too  seriously. 
And  then  there  will  come  a  reaction.  He  is  very  serious 
in  his  main  purpose  ;  and  his  very  seriousness  has  its 
share  in  making  him  unconventional  and  startling. 
In  the  fullness  of  his  heart  he  becomes  colloquial. 
And  in  conversation  we  can  say  strong  things — 
violent  and  exaggerated  things — without  detriment  to 
seriousness  of  purpose.  Moreover,  we  can  be  pro- 
voked into  saying  false  and  indefensible  things,  which 
do  not  much  matter,  for  spoken  words  can  be  corrected, 
or  afterwards  laid  aside  with  a  laugh  if  challenged. 
It  is  by  this  standard  that  Mr.  Chesterton  must  be 
judged ;  and  I  think  that  to  many  who  forget  the 
above  considerations  his  written  words  are  unper- 
suasive. 

At  times  he  does  not  answer  an  enemy  at  all,  but 
spends  a  page  in  refuting  a  travesty  of  his  position 
which  no  one  worth  convincing  holds.     He  tells  us, 


MR.   CHESTERTON  AMONG    THE  PROPHETS        133 

for  example,  that   "an  imbecile   habit  has  arisen  in 
modern  controversy  of  saying  that  such  and  such  a 
creed  can  be  held  in  one  age,  but  cannot  in  another." 
His  criticism  is  that  M  you  might  as  well  say  that  a 
certain  philosophy  can  be  believed  on  Mondays,  but 
cannot    be    believed   on   Tuesdays."     As   a    protest 
against   fanatical   worshippers   of  the    Zeitgeist   this 
may  have   some   meaning  ;    although  in  cases  where 
Mr.  Chesterton's  parallel  is  accurate  it  is  too  obvious. 
But  as  a  serious  reply  to  persons  really  worth  arguing 
with,  it  is  little  less  than  absurd.     What  is  generally 
meant  by  the  statement  Mr.  Chesterton  attacks  is  that 
some  beliefs  connected  with  religion  are  possible  in 
one  stage  of  civilization  and  education,  impossible  in 
another.     The  popular  setting   and  explication  of  a 
creed  changes.    Creeds  are  arrayed,  I  need  hardly  say, 
in  popular  legend  and  illustrated  in  terms  of  contem- 
porary science,  and  these  do  unquestionably  yield  to 
the  pressure  of  advancing  knowledge.     It  is  not  (as 
Mr. Chesterton  assumes)  a  fundamental  philosophy  that 
changes,  but  that  concrete  embodiment  of  it  which 
includes  popular  superstitions.     The  educated  Indian 
will  not  now  believe  with  his  ancestors  that  the  world 
rests  on  the  back  of  a  tortoise.     Among-  Christians 
themselves — to  avoid   ground  even  conceivably  dis- 
putable— many   beliefs  were    possible   before  Coper- 
nicanism     prevailed     which     are     now     impossible. 
Christians  could  once  believe  literally  the  saying  of 
the    Psalmist,    terra    in   cetermim   stat.     They   could 
regard  the  Ascension  as  the  rising  of  Our  Lord  from 
a  stationary  earth  to  a  local  heaven  above  the  blue 
sky.     They  could  regard  such  pictures  as  the  frescoes 
of  Orcagna  in  the  Campo  Santo  at  Pisa  as  represent- 
ing a  literal  fact  as  to  the  prospect  for  our  souls  after 


134  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

death.  Mr.  Chesterton  is,  of  course,  justified  in  pro- 
testing against  the  idea  that  an  entire  religious  creed 
belongs  only  to  an  epoch,  and  not  to  mankind  as  such. 
He  may  rightly  protest,  moreover,  against  changes  in 
detailed  popular  beliefs,  really  made  to  suit  the  whim 
of  one  generation,  and  advocated  under  cover  of  a 
peremptory  law  of  progress.  But  the  value  of  such 
writing  as  his  is  that  it  often  gives  a  truth  with  start- 
ling distinctness.  In  this  instance  it  does  nothing  of 
the  kind,  but  appears  to  state  a  falsehood  and  to  miss 
the  force  of  the  position  it  criticizes.  The  stage  of 
Silas  Marner's  life,  in  which  he  believed  that  the  lots 
revealed  the  decision  of  God,  was  succeeded  by  the 
disproof  of  this  belief.  Superstition  was  driven  out 
by  experience.  Henceforth  his  belief  of  God's  action 
in  the  world  had  either  to  be  held  differently  or 
entirely  abandoned.  And  there  is,  of  course,  a  similar 
advance  in  experience  and  education  in  the  history  of 
any  civilization. 

Again,  Mr.  Chesterton's  tirade  against  liberal 
theology  seems  to  me  to  miss  the  mark.  I  differ  from 
such  extreme  liberalism,  of  course,  as  much  as  Mr. 
Chesterton  does,  but  I  quite  differ  from  him  as  to 
why  it  claims  to  be  liberal.  Its  devotees  claim  for 
it  that  it  is  liberal  because  it  leaves  you  free  to  reject 
much  on  which  orthodoxy  insists.  They  hold  no 
doubt  (among  other  unorthodox  tenets)  that  miracles 
are  impossible.  I  agree  with  Mr.  Chesterton  that 
this  belief  is  often  in  individuals  based  on  an  irrational 
d  priori  assumption.  But  Mr.  Chesterton  speaks  of 
liberal  theology  as  though  it  claimed  to  be  liberal 
on  the  ground  of  its  enforcing  this  belief.1  He 
treats  it  to  much  epigrammatic  and  scornful  invective 

1  Page  254. 


MR.   CHESTERTON  AMONG    THE  PROPHETS         135 

on  the  basis  of  its  intolerance.  Some  liberals  are,  no 
doubt,  intolerant :  but  the  liberal  school  surely  holds 
its  name  in  virtue  of  permission,  not  of  insistence. 
Liberal  theology  is  a  haven  for  those  who  cannot 
believe  in  miracles.  Mr.  Chesterton  treats  it  as  a 
Torquemada  for  those  who  can. 

Similarly,  in  another  place,  he  totally  ignores  the 
distinction  between  preventive  and  retributive  punish- 
ment, and  treats  a  system  which  denies  the  use  of 
the  latter  as  though  it  denied  the  use  of  the  former.1 
Again,  in  his  attack  on  modern  theories  of  evolu- 
tion and  progress,  he  poses  as  an  exhaustive  alter- 
native an  absolutely  fixed  ideal,  or  an  ideal  which 
completely  changes.  This  gives  him  the  occasion  for 
excellent  fooling,  but  does  not  meet  the  really  rational 
exponents  of  the  theory  he  attacks  at  all.  Let  me 
attempt  to  give  my  meaning  in  the  author's  own 
manner.  If  I  say,  "  You  must  walk  towards  a  fixed 
point  on  the  horizon  if  you  want  to  make  progress. 
If,  every  time  you  look  up,  you  change  your  direction 
and  walk  towards  a  different  point  in  the  opposite  direc- 
tion, you  don't  get  on  at  all,"  I  say  what  is  very  true. 
But  such  a  remark  is  no  reply  to  those  who  say  that 
the  nearer  you  get  to  your  fixed  point  the  more  you  see 
in  its  neighbourhood,  and  the  further  you  see  beyond 
it.  So,  too,  to  oppose  change  in  ideals,  as  paralyzing, 
is  an  excellent  reply  to  those  for  whom  each  fresh 
philosophy  they  read  completely  revolutionizes  their 
estimate  of  the  ideal  aim  to  be  achieved  :  but  it  is  no 
reply  to  those  who  maintain  a  growth  in  its  distinct- 
ness— a  growing  clearness  in  its  explication.  Again, 
when  he  tells  us  that  to  distrust  a  peasant's  ghost 
story  is  necessarily  either  to  distrust  "  the  people  "  or 

1  Page  42. 


136  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

to  preach  the  intrinsic  impossibility  of  ghosts,  he  is 
surely  talking  nonsense.  I  would  pit  the  expert 
against  the  people  in  a  problem  of  conic  sections,  and 
an  educated  man  against  a  peasant  in  taking  evidence 
for  a  fact  in  connexion  with  which  popular  supersti- 
tions are  rampant  among  the  peasantry.  Yet  this  is 
not  to  deny  the  value  of  healthy  public  opinion. 
His  alternative  ignores  the  real  question  and  reads 
like  a  mere  joke. 

The  instances  given  above,  though  not  the  worst, 
have  this  special  disadvantage,  that  the  changes  in 
the  form  of  religious  belief  called  for  by  changes  in 
human  knowledge  have  been  ever  since  Galileo's  time 
just  the  point  on  which  the  opponents  of  "  orthodoxy" 
have  something  to  say  which  has  to  be  answered.  It 
is  a  pity,  therefore,  that  this  something  is  here  mis- 
represented instead  of  being  met.  It  can  only  be  met 
by  admitting  scrupulously  the  element  of  truth  which 
is  contained  in  their  assertions,  and  showing  that 
"orthodoxy"  can  admit  the  truth  while  it  rejects  its 
exaggerations.  Mr.  Chesterton,  on  the  contrary, 
appears  to  exaggerate  the  intolerance  of  orthodoxy 
almost  to  the  point  of  a  literal  credo  quia  impossibile. 

Some  of  my  readers  will  smile  at  these  solemn 
criticisms  on  my  part.  They  will  say,  "  Of  course ; 
that  is  just  Chesterton's  way."  But  I  point  out  these 
instances  because  I  think  it  is  not  Mr.  Chesterton's 
more  usual  way.  His  epigrams  and  sayings  are  far 
more  often  illuminating.  In  such  instances  they  are 
on  the  whole  misleading.  I  could  quote  other  instances 
in  which  they  are  yet  more  misleading.  And  to  class 
them  all  together  is  just  one  of  the  means  whereby 
his  critics  give  a  false  impression  of  his  work.  I  do 
not  ask  for  the  omission  of  all  such  passages — this 


MR.   CHESTERTON  AMONG    THE  PROPHETS        137 

would  be  too  much.  Mr.  Chesterton  moves  onward 
in  his  shirt  sleeves,  throwing  out  all  the  brilliant  say- 
ings that  come  into  his  head  ;  and  to  ask  him  now 
entirely  to  change  his  manner  and  put  on  his  coat, 
would  probably  be  to  cramp  his  movements  and  lose 
the  best  of  him  as  well  as  the  less  good.  I  only  say 
that  there  is  a  gallery  looking  on  which  sees  in  his 
best  only  what  is  to  be  found  in  his  worst — only 
paradox,  more  or  less  brilliant  or  surprising  as  the 
case  may  be — and  I  should  be  very  sorry  if  the 
applause  of  that  gallery  ever  became  Mr.  Chesterton's 
test  of  the  value  of  what  he  writes,  or  his  inducement 
to  write. 

I  must  not,  however,  exaggerate  in  my  criticisms. 
The  pages  I  have  just  referred  to  have  a  serious 
value  in  spite  of  their  faults.  They  are  not  mere 
brilliant  paradox.  If  they  are  ineffective  against 
the  more  reasonable  critics  of  Orthodoxy,  they  are 
most  effective  against  the  popular  excesses  and 
defects  of  the  general  movement  they  represent. 
To  read  them  brings  home  most  forcibly  the  chaos 
of  thought  and  paralysis  of  effort  resulting  from 
individualism — from  thought  ever  beginning  afresh, 
and  substituting  for  the  old  corporate  faith  an  eager 
alacrity  to  abandon  the  achievements  of  the  past,  and 
beliefs  tested  by  practical  success.  Such  a  method 
makes  construction  impossible.  It  means  ever  hesi- 
tating or  pulling  down,  never  trusting  or  building. 
The  argument  which  in  these  pages  is  advanced  on 
behalf  of  a  true  creed  and  against  a  philosophy  of 
progress,  exaggerating  the  immutability  of  the  former 
and  the  mutability  of  the  latter,  fails  in  that  it  does 
not  recognize  the  constructive  and  corporate  elements 
in  modern  thought,  in  the  hands  of  its  best  exponents. 


138  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

But  it  stands  as  a  plea  for  the  value  of  stability  in 
conviction.  Moreover,  it  shows  the  value  of  such 
stability  even  where  the  ideal  and  creed  adhered  to 
are  largely  wrong.  And  this  is  the  application  which 
Mr.  Chesterton  himself  ultimately  gives  to  his  words. 
They  are  an  apology  for  deep  convictions,  inspiring 
to  action  and  hard  to  change — for  strength  of  in- 
tellectual character.  His  view,  perhaps,  needs  for 
its  basis  some  of  that  very  trust  in  the  forces  at  work 
in  progress  which  Mr.  Chesterton  lightly  rejects. 
Or  I  should  prefer  to  say  that  it  needs  for  its  basis  a 
trust  that  we  are  fulfilling  the  designs  of  Providence 
in  working  hard  for  the  best  we  can  see. 

The  argument  stands  for  conviction  as  against 
scepticism — as  supposing  not  that  all  deep  convictions 
are  absolutely  true,  but  that  presumably  they  are 
partly  true,  and  that  to  hold  by  them  and  to  act  on 
them  in  the  first  instance  is  a  sounder  principle  than  a 
ready  scepticism.  The  former  course  will  lead  to 
their  gradual  correction  as  logic  and  experience  test 
them  in  action.  The  latter  foregoes  the  test  of  action 
and  leads  to  an  attitude  of  negation  which  is  morbid 
and  paralyzing.  The  sceptic  is  ever  occupied  in 
straining  his  eyes  to  examine  what  is  deeper  down 
than  it  is  given  us  to  see.  Mr.  Chesterton's  argument 
is  a  plea  against  that  blunder  in  reasoning  which  con- 
sists in  carrying  analysis  too  far — in  the  "  exercise 
of  thought  in  matters  in  which,  from  the  constitution 
of  the  human  mind,  thought  cannot  be  brought 
to  a  successful  issue."  As  an  argument  for  convic- 
tion against  flabbiness,  for  action  against  inaction, 
for  reform  against  stagnation,  these  pages  are  very 
powerful.  As  an  argument  against  growth  in  the 
definiteness  of  the  aim  to  be  striven  for,  they  miss  the 


MR.   CHESTERTON  AMONG    THE  PROPHETS         139 

mark.  But  there  is  profound  truth  amid  paradox  in 
the  criticism  of  a  degree  of  intellectual  plasticity  which 
robs  individual  effort  of  intensity  and  makes  persever- 
ance impossible.  The  excessive  openness  of  mind 
which  is  at  the  root  of  this  tends  not  towards  progress 
and  reform,  but  towards  its  opposite — stagnation.  For 
things  can  only  be  changed — change  can  only  be 
planned — to  suit  a  fixed  ideal  of  something  better.  If 
such  an  ideal  is  not  persistent  or  inspiring,  the  motive- 
power  for  change  is  gone.  Over-great  intellectual 
plasticity  is  thus  the  bulwark  of  stagnant  conservatism. 
Here  again  we  have  a  thought  which  is  extremely 
interesting  and  among  the  most  suggestive  in  the 
book  :  and  the  passage  in  which  this  conclusion  is 
reached  is  an  excellent  illustration  of  the  method  in 
Mr.  Chesterton's  occasional  madness,  and  the  vivid 
light  thrown  by  his  most  fantastic  illustrations  on 
important  principles. 

This  is  our  first  requirement  about  the  ideal  towards 
which  progress  is  directed  ;  it  must  be  fixed.  Whistler  used 
to  make  many  rapid  studies  of  a  sitter ;  it  did  not  matter  if 
he  tore  up  twenty  portraits.  But  it  would  matter  if  he 
looked  up  twenty  times,  and  each  time  saw  a  new  person 
sitting  placidly  for  his  portrait.  So  it  does  not  matter  (com- 
paratively speaking)  how  often  humanity  fails  to  imitate  its 
ideal ;  for  then  all  its  old  failures  are  fruitful.  But  it  does 
frightfully  matter  how  often  humanity  changes  its  ideal ;  for 
then  all  its  old  failures  are  fruitless.  .  .  . 

.  .  .  Let  us  suppose  a  man  wanted  a  particular  kind  of 
world  ;  say  a  blue  world.  He  would  have  no  cause  to  com- 
plain of  the  slightness  or  swiftness  of  his  task  ;  he  might  toil 
for  a  long  time  at  the  transformation  ;  he  could  work  away 
(in  every  sense)  until  all  was  blue.  He  could  have  heroic 
adventures  ;  the  putting  of  the  last  touches  to  a  blue  tiger. 
He  could  have  fairy  dreams  ;  the  dawn  of  a  blue  moon.     But 


140  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

if  he  worked  hard,  that  high-minded  reformer  would  certainly 
(from  his  own  point  of  view)  leave  the  world  better  and 
bluer  than  he  found  it.  If  he  altered  a  blade  of  grass  to  his 
favourite  colour  every  day,  he  would  get  on  slowly.  But  if 
he  altered  his  favourite  colour  every  day,  he  would  not  get  on 
at  all.  If,  after  reading  a  fresh  philosopher,  he  started  to 
paint  everything  red  or  yellow,  his  work  would  be  thrown 
away :  there  would  be  nothing  to  show  except  a  few  blue 
tigers  walking  about,  specimens  of  his  early  bad  manner. 
This  is  exactly  the  position  of  the  average  modern  thinker. 
It  will  be  said  that  this  is  avowedly  a  preposterous  example. 
But  it  is  literally  the  fact  of  recent  history.  The  great  and 
grave  changes  in  our  political  civilization  all  belong  to  the 
early  nineteenth  century,  not  to  the  later.  They  belonged 
to  the  black-and-white  epoch,  when  men  believed  fixedly  in 
Toryism,  in  Protestantism,  in  Calvinism,  in  Reform,  and  not 
infrequently  in  Revolution.  And  whatever  each  man  be- 
lieved in,  he  hammered  at  steadily,  without  scepticism  :  and 
there  was  a  time  when  the  Established  Church  might  have 
fallen,  and  the  House  of  Lords  nearly  fell.  It  was  because 
Radicals  were  wise  enough  to  be  constant  and  consistent ;  it 
was  because  Radicals  were  wise  enough  to  be  Conservative. 
.  .  .  Let  beliefs  fade  fast  and  frequently  if  you  wish  institu- 
tions to  remain  the  same.  The  more  the  life  of  the  mind  is 
unhinged,  the  more  the  machinery  of  matter  will  be  left  to 
itself.  The  net  result  of  all  our  political  suggestions,  Collec- 
tivism, Tolstoyanism,  Neo-Feudalism,  Communism,  Anarchy, 
Scientific  Bureaucracy — the  plain  fruit  of  all  of  them  is  that 
the  Monarchy  and  the  House  of  Lords  will  remain.  The 
net  result  of  all  the  new  religions  will  be  that  the  Church  of 
England  will  not  (for  heaven  knows  how  long)  be  disestab- 
lished. It  was  Karl  Marx,  Nietsche,  Tolstoy,  Cunningham 
Graham,  Bernard  Shaw  and  Auberon  Herbert,  who  between 
them,  with  bowed,  gigantic  backs,  bore  up  the  throne  of  the 
Archbishop  of  Canterbury. 

Taken  as  a  whole,  Orthodoxy  is  a  timely  warning 
given  to  his  contemporaries  with  a  youthful  force  and 


MR.   CHESTERTON  AMONG   THE  PROPHETS       141 

keenness  by  a  convert  to  the  aged  creed  of  Christen- 
dom, which  has  passed  its  1900th  birthday.  We 
learn  how  he  has  come  to  realize  the  inner  force  of  its 
truth — "  time  honoured  "  for  some  of  the  philosophers, 
"  effete  "  for  others,  ever  young  for  Mr.  Chesterton 
His  pages  are  marked  by  the  freshness  and  often  by 
the  insight  of  genius — no  other  word  can  be  used. 
They  have  not  the  balance  of  an  all-round  philosophy. 
They  do  not  show  the  fastidious  taste  and  discrimina- 
tion characteristic  of  the  typical  scholar.  They  have 
not  the  artistic  finish  of  the  poet ;  and  the  true  poetry 
of  many  a  paragraph  is  marred  by  the  transition  from 
the  sublime  to  the  ridiculous.  Yet  in  this  there  is 
meaning  and  method.  It  is  a  carrying  into  action  of 
the  view  expressed  in  the  epilogue  to  Mr.  Chester- 
ton's clever  novel,  the  Napoleon  of  Notting  Hill,  that 
there  are  ever  two  aspects  of  the  truth,  the  serious 
and  the  humorous.  It  is  the  utterance  of  a  man  for 
whom,  to  use  Jowett's  phrase,  U  things  serious  and 
profane  lie  near  together,  and  yet  are  never  confused." 
And  the  man  who  is  more  than  his  arguments  must 
put  himself  into  his  writing.  The  book  is  the  trumpet 
call  of  a  reformer  who,  like  all  reformers  puts  his 
entire  energy  into  his  mission,  and,  therefore,  cannot 
afford  to  be  reflectively  fastidious. 

Nevertheless,  it  remains  very  singular  that  one 
so  sensitive  to  the  poetry  which  modern  life  has 
parted  with,  so  greatly  impressed  by  the  loss  of 
dignity  which  our  commonplace  surroundings  have 
brought,  should  in  his  own  writing  apparently  rejoice 
in  just  that  destruction  of  dignity  which  commonplace 
images  bring.  Mr.  Chesterton  seems  to  have  a  dual 
personality  ;  and  it  is  put  together  from  the  heroes 
of  his  own  novel — Adam  Wayne  and  Auberon.     He 


142  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

hates  a  red  pillar-box  ;  he  loves  the  robes  of  Becket. 
Yet  there  is  an  enjoyment  of  incongruity  which  the 
present  writer   at  least,  while   enjoying   its  brilliant 
displays,  finds  it  difficult  to  reconcile  with  such  tastes. 
Something   might    be    said   as   to    Mr.    Chesterton's 
resemblance  in  this  respect  to  Browning — of  whom 
Tennyson  always  said  that  he  had  a  keen  sense  of 
the  music  in  poetry.     Yet  the  unmusical   rhymes  he 
loved  seemed  to  show  a  very  different  side  of  him. 
Both    writers   have  asserted  their   individuality  with 
singular    and    unconventional    boldness.      Browning 
carried  the  public  with  him  in  the  end ;  so,  perhaps, 
will  Mr.  Chesterton.     Yet  I  am  not  convinced  that 
the  manner  of   either   is    consistent  with  the  truest 
literary  art. 

However,  a  powerful  individuality  "  maun  e'en 
gang  his  ain  gait."  And  it  is  very  many  years  since 
so  much  individuality  has  been  brought  to  bear  on 
controversies  which  are  so  largely  long-standing  ones. 
Orthodoxy  is  a  book  to  upset  the  pedant,  to  irritate 
Mr.  Chesterton's  betes  noires,  the  "  dreary  and  well- 
informed."  Here  it  hits  with  wonderful  precision  the 
one  weak  spot — the  heel  of  Achilles — in  some 
ingenious  but  demoralizing  system.  There  the  read- 
ing of  the  relevant  literature  has  been  careless,  and 
the  mark  is  missed — a  lay  figure  is  destroyed,  a  most 
amusing  play  is  enacted  in  the  destruction,  and  so  the 
matter  ends.  The  Casaubons  of  the  age,  and  even 
their  betters,  may  find  in  the  book  much  to  criticize. 
11 A  man,"  they  will  say,  "  ought  not  to  have  written 
this  page,  who  had  not  read  this  and  was  not  familiar 
with  that."  It  is  a  book  which  makes  a  challenge 
most  unwelcome  to  the  conventional  philosophers — 
"  is   this  a  brilliant  charlatan  or  a  man  of  genius  ?  " 


MR.    CHESTERTON  AMONG    THE   PROPHETS       143 

The    former    verdict   must  bring    an    uncomfortable 
sense   of  insufficiency.     To   the   latter  our  age   ex- 
tremely dislikes   to   commit   itself.      The    book    can 
hardly   fail    to   be    a    great    force   with   the  natural 
body-guard   of    reality   and    originality   in    literature 
— the  abler   spirits  of   the  rising   generation  ;    those 
who  have  not  yet  lost  the  instinct  which  detects  and 
prizes   vital   thought,    and    sees   through   the   shams 
which  so  often  accompany  highly  conventional  writing. 
In  our  own  late  day,  a  work  on  these  well-worn  themes 
rarely  affords  half  a  dozen  passages  which  come  upon 
one  with  the  feeling  that,  in  the  sense  above  indicated, 
we  have  found  something  original.    In  this  work  one's 
pencil  marks  half  a  hundred.     J.  S.  Mill  told  us,  fifty 
years  ago,   that  we  must  master  the  whole   existing 
literature  of  these  discussions  before  we  are  fitted  to 
say  anything  new.     But  soon  after  he  said  it,  signs 
were     apparent    of    the    advance    of    specialism    at 
accelerated  speed,  of  the  consequent  complete  crush- 
ing  of   individual    thought    under   the   ever-growing 
weight  of  accumulated  authorities.     Our  Davids  did 
their  best  to  put  on  Saul's  armour,  but  it  had  become 
so  heavy  that  before  they  had  even  got  it  all  on  their 
energies  were  spent.     In  philosophy  and  in  theology 
it   was   the  same.     In   Mill's  time,  the  few  experts 
could  fulfil    his  test,   and  originality  could,  perhaps, 
emerge    after  the  severe   training.     Now   specialism 
has  so  greatly  developed  that  it  hardly  can.     Perhaps 
in  Mr.   Chesterton  it  would   have  done  so,   had  his 
training  been  that   of  an   expert.     But   it   has   not. 
And  one  of  the  very  few  men  who  could,  I  believe, 
have  now  fulfilled  Mill's  test,  and  remained  original 
after  the  second  half  of  a  training — of  which  the  first 
half  is   still  good    for  all — has   set   the   example    of 


144  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

going  forth  with  little  of  equipment  over  and  above 
his  own  extraordinary  force  and  skill — little  beyond 
the  stone  and  the  sling.  The  result  is,  however, 
something  which  must  be  taken  very  seriously  indeed  ; 
and  if  even  half  of  what  he  says  needs  qualification 
and  correction,  that  will  not  prevent  the  book  giving 
us  as  a  permanent  legacy  more  of  original  and  practi- 
cally helpful  suggestions  than  perhaps  anything  which 
has  appeared  in  our  own  day  on  Chateaubriand's 
theme,  "  the  genius  of  Christianity." 


V 

JOHN   STUART   MILL 

The  publication  of  Mill's  letters  in   1910  made  the 
picture  of  him  attainable  by  the   reading  public   as 
complete  as  in  all  probability  it  will  ever  be.     The 
Autobiography   and    the    Criticism    by    his    intimate 
friend,    Mr.   Bain,  told    us  much.     The  Letters  and 
the   brief   diary  appended   to   them   go   far  towards 
filling  in  details  of  a  portrait  of  which  they  do  not 
change    the    general    character.     In    reading    these 
contemporary  records  we  certainly  get  very   near  to 
the  man  who  exercised  in  his   generation    an    intel- 
lectual   influence   which   was    almost  unique.       That 
influence  has  been  succeeded  by  the  usual  reaction. 
But  it  extended  in  its  day  to  minds  so  various,  and 
so  far  beyond  the  school  of  thought  with  which  Mill 
was  identified,  that  it  is  not  likely  that  posterity  will 
fail    to   do   him  justice — though   his  reputation    may 
never  again  stand  quite  as  high  as  it  did  in    1870. 
The   letters    have  not  been   so  widely  read  as  they 
deserve  to  be,  and  I  shall  quote  freely  from  them  in 
the  course  of  the  ensuing  observations. 

Some  forty  years  ago  two  comments  on  Mill 
used  often  to  be  cited,  made  by  the  two  men 
who  were  then  the  most  prominent  figures  in  the 
English  world  of  politics.  Mr.  Gladstone  spoke  of 
him  (and,  I  think,  also  wrote  of  him)  as  the  "  saint 

L 


146  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

of  Rationalism."     Mr.  Disraeli,  whose  attention  was 
called  to  Mill  by  his  somewhat  unexpected  apparition 
in  later  life  in  the  House  of  Commons  as  member  for 
Westminster,  when  asked  after  a  session's  experience 
of  the  new  member  what  he  thought  of  him,  replied 
with  a  shrug  of  the  shoulders,  "  A  political  finishing 
governess."       Mr.    Gladstone's    verdict,  that   of  one 
who  knew  and  valued  Mill's  work,  was  a  profound 
and  true  one ;    Disraeli's — passed   by  one  who  pro- 
bably knew  nothing  of  Mill  beyond  his  speeches  in 
the  House — was  an  obviously  superficial  one,  indeed 
not  a  verdict  at  all.     But  taken  merely  as  what  it  was, 
a  statement  of  the  impression  made  by  Mill  upon  an 
acute  but  superficial  observer,  who  was  all  the  more 
alive  to  mannerisms  because  the  real  man  was  totally 
beyond  his  purview,  it  suggests  very  truly  the  limita- 
tions of  one  who  was  in  some  respects  a  really  great 
man.      These    limitations    appeared   not   in   politics 
alone.     They  were  in  fact  the  defects  of  those  very 
qualities   which    won    Gladstone's   admiration.      Mill 
had  the  educating  mania,  and  it  was  largely  inspired 
by  that  religious  zeal  for  the  improvement  of  mankind 
which    formed   part   of  his    "  saintship."      From   his 
father  he  had  early  learnt  to  think  that  if  only  people 
were  thoroughly  well  educated  and  freed  from  the 
dead  hand  of  outworn  institutions  all  would  be  well 
with  the  world.     And  greatly  though  his  views  event- 
ually  changed,  this  early  way  of  looking  at  things 
left    its   stamp   on   him   through   life.       His   cult   of 
education  issued  in  a  certain  priggishness  and  pre- 
ciseness,  and  a  detestation  of  anything  vague  and  not 
clearly  communicable  to  those  whom  he  would  instruct 
and  help.     It  is  to  this  side  of  his  intellectual  cha- 
racter that  we  may  set  down  his  admiration  for  the 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  147 

French  intellect  and  his  extraordinary  undervaluing 
of  such  German  metaphysicians  as  Hegel  and  Fichte. 
To  this  again  must  be  ascribed  his  intense  joy  in 
distinct  classification — which  made  Dumont's  redaction 
of  Bentham  (of  which  I  shall  speak  later  on)  as  in- 
spiring and  satisfying  to  him  as  Fichte  and  Hegel 
were  almost  physically  distressing.  It  is  the  "  finish- 
ing governess  "  element  again  which  made  his  own 
unique  and  precocious  early  education  for  years  the 
sole  matter  of  interest  to  him,  and  led  him  afterwards 
to  analyze  its  results  with  such  painful  care.  Like  a 
Jesuit  confessor  he  regarded  recreation  only  as  a 
means  to  the  accomplishment  of  his  main  purpose. 
In  his  autobiography  he  refers  to  frequent  holidays 
as  a  boy  of  seven,  eight,  nine,  and  ten  spent  at  the 
old  baronial  hall  (Ford  Abbey)  rented  by  Mr.  Bentham, 
as  "an  important  circumstance  in  my  education,"  and 
as  contributing  "  to  nourish  elevation  of  sentiment." 
He  saw  the  Pyrenees  at  the  age  of  fourteen.  This 
is  interesting  to  him  because  it  "gave  a  colour  to 
my  tastes  through  life."  The  interest  of  nearly  every 
event  in  his  life  is  determined  by  its  effect  on  his 
mind  and  character. 

The  priggishness  and  preciseness  which  called 
forth  Disraeli's  saying  were  in  part  caused  by  those 
peculiarities  of  Mill's  own  early  education.  He  had 
the  ways  of  one  who  learnt  in  the  first  instance  from 
books  and  in  the  schoolroom  rather  than,  as  Charles 
Dickens  did,  from  the  vivid  impressions  made  by 
actual  life  on  a  boy's  imagination.  Mr.  Bain  tells  us 
that  to  the  end  his  hold  on  abstract  principles  was  far 
closer  than  on  the  concrete — on  the  facts  of  life  and 
the  world.  His  extraordinary  precocity  was  a  hot- 
house  growth,    and   he   never   quite    recovered   the 


1 48  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

fulness  of  human  nature.  There  was  in  Mill  to  the 
end  a  certain  thinness  of  sympathy  and  a  deficiency 
in  geniality,  though  his  sympathies  were  very  intense 
in  their  own  narrow  groove.1  There  was  a  lack  of 
full  humanity.  He  had  little  sense  of  the  ludicrous. 
He  did  not  enter  into  or  understand  the  varieties  of 
human  character,  and  he  was  wanting  in  virility. 
These  last  two  traits  were  evidenced  in  his  believing 
that  all  men  were  like  himself  and  like  one  another  in 
the  insignificant  place  which  (as  he  maintained)  the 
sexual  instinct  normally  occupied  in  the  life  of  man- 
kind. He  traced  obvious  exceptions  to  this  rule  to 
abnormal  conditions.  By  a  little  management  in 
education  the  propensity  in  question  could,  he  con- 
sidered, be  reduced  to  an  almost  negligible  quantity, 
and  he  once  expressed  to  my  father  in  conversation 
the  opinion  that  the  human  race  would  come  to  an 
end  by  its  ultimate  complete  disappearance. 

It  is  also,  I  think,  a  mark  of  the  "governess  "  side 
of  Mill's  character  that  the  published  volumes  of  his 
letters,  absorbing  though  they  are,  exert  something 
of  a  strain  on  the  logical  faculty  of  the  reader.  There 
is  little  or  no  imagination  in  them.  Of  humour  there 
is  one  gleam  and  only  one — and  it  comes  from  no 
words  of  Mill,  but  from  a  suggestion  of  Roebuck. 
Mill's  speeches  in  the  House  of  Commons  were  (it 
seems)  weakened  in  their  effect  first  by  an  impression 
of  hesitation  as  to  the  sequence  of  topics  and  argu- 
ments, and  secondly  by  his  manner  of  delivery.  He 
had  a  habit,  in  Roebuck's  words,  "  of  joining  his 
hands  behind  him  and  rolling  from  side  to  side  like 
a  schoolboy  saying  his  lessons."     Possibly  the  general 

1  Here  again  he  laboriously  analyzed  a  deficiency  which  in  him  was 
so  marked.    See  Diary,  ii.  360. 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  149 

effect  was  somewhat  similar  to  what  many  of  us 
remember  who  have  seen  and  heard  another  great 
writer,  the  late  Mr.  Lecky,  addressing  the  House  of 
Commons.  Roebuck  prescribed  as  a  remedy  that  he 
should  write  out  the  heads  of  his  speech  on  a  card, 
and  should  stand  every  day,  card  in  hand,  for  some 
minutes  before  a  large  looking-glass  and  rehearse  the 
coming  oration  systematically. 

The  publication  of  Mill's  letters  on  the  whole 
confirmed  the  impression  already  created  by  the  Auto- 
biography. Sometimes  the  intimate  personal  address 
of  letter-writing  brings  out  a  freshness  of  style  which 
is  wanting  in  writings  designed  for  publication,  and 
reveals  qualities  which  are  not  apparent  in  conver- 
sation. It  is  not  so  with  Mill.  The  letters  do  not 
give  their  readers  any  sense  of  exuberant  life  in  the 
man,  overflowing  in  self-expression.  This  stimulating 
quality  is  to  be  found  in  different  forms  in  the 
correspondence  of  many  of  Mill's  contemporaries — 
Carlyle,  Macaulay  (whom  Mill  despised),  John  Henry 
Newman,  Ruskin — to  name  only  a  few  writers  of  very 
different  schools  of  thought.  Mill,  on  the  contrary,  in 
his  letters  as  in  his  published  writings,  is  critical, 
analytic,  practical,  immensely  painstaking,  never 
spontaneous,  rarely  creative.  The  great  modesty  of 
the  man,  who  ascribed  all  he  ever  did  to  his  father's 
training,  and  placed  his  own  gifts  as  "  rather  below 
than  above  par,"  must  never  be  forgotten.1  It  almost 
disarms  criticism,  which  is  nevertheless  necessary, 
in  order  to  understand  both  his  influence  and  its 
limitations. 

In  point  of  fact,  his  own  account  of  all  he  owed 
to  his  father's  method  of  educating  him  recognizes  the 
1  See  Autobiography,  p.  17. 


t5o  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

advantages  of  that  method  but  not  its  drawbacks. 
The  early  hothouse  forcing  of  a  mind  which  was  set 
to  learn  Greek  at  four  and  Latin  at  eight,  and 
encouraged  in  destructive  analysis  of  those  natural 
sources  of  enthusiasm  which  most  men  find  in  national 
institutions  and  in  religion,  killed  much  while  it 
developed  much.  It  developed  in  an  extraordinary 
degree  the  reasoning  powers,  but  it  tended  to  depress 
vitality  and  imagination,  and  to  make  the  logical 
faculty  unduly  predominant.  He  associated  little 
with  other  boys.  He  was  never  able  to  achieve  any 
success  in  games  or  sport,  and  soon  gave  up  the 
attempt  to  cultivate  such  pastimes.  He  spoke  of 
himself  as  being  in  early  life  little  more  than  a  logical 
machine,1  despising  sentiment  on  principle.3  Great 
though  the  change  was  which  ultimately  came  over  his 
attitude  towards  the  cultivation  of  the  affections  and 
the  imagination,  these  qualities  of  the  boy  did  in  some 
degree  over-shadow  him  through  life.  He  eventually 
desired  to  awaken  the  faculties  he  had  despised,  but 
it  did  not  prove  entirely  possible  ;  they  had  become 
partially  atrophied.  Sentiment,  when  it  came  to  him 
and  was  systematically  developed,  had  always  in  it 
something  thin,  something  hectic.  He  inhaled  his 
oxygen  not  in  the  fields  but  artificially  through  an 
air  pump.  Passion  and  feeling  were  narrow  though 
intense — intense  in  sympathy  with  the  people  and 
popular  wrongs,  with  the  ills  of  humanity,  finding 
vent  also  in  an  idolatrous  worship,  without  an  atom 
of  the  normal  passion  of  a  man  for  a  woman,  towards 
her  who  became  to  him  that  ideal  of  worshipful 
womanhood  with  which  Comte  endeavoured  to  replace 
the  Catholic  culte  of  the  Virgin  Mother. 

1  See  Autobiography,  p.  62.  2  Ibid.  p.  64. 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  151 

This  is  the  general  character  of  the  limitations 
which  are  so  conspicuous  in  his  correspondence,  and 
which  were  responsible  for  Disraeli's  witty  and  unfair 
saying.  And  they  were  largely  due  to  the  way  in 
which  his  father  educated  him. 

A  characteristic  letter  of  Mill's  boyhood  given  to 
the  world  thirty  years  ago  by  Mr.  Bain  in  his 
Criticism  of  Mill,  throws  the  vivid  light  of  contem- 
porary illustration  on  the  unique  story  of  the  boy's 
education,  which  is  so  important  as  a  clue  to  the 
man's  characteristics.  It  is  addressed  to  Jeremy 
Bentham's  brother,  Sir  Samuel  Bentham.  The 
Benthams  had  known  John  Mill  as  a  child.  George 
Bentham  had  taken  him  at  the  age  of  five  to  see 
Lady  Spencer — the  wife  of  Lord  Spencer,  First  Lord 
of  the  Admiralty — and  Mill  had  kept  up  an  animated 
conversation  with  her  on  the  comparative  merits  of 
Wellington  and  Marlborough.  When  he  stayed  with 
the  Benthams  at  the  age  of  eight  they  found  that  he  had 
already  read  in  Greek  yEsop's  Fables,  Xenophon's 
Anabasis,  Cyropadia  and  Memorabilia,  Herodotus, 
part  of  Lucian,  and  two  speeches  of  Isocrates ;  also 
in  English  the  histories  of  Robertson,  Hume,  Gibbon, 
Burnet's  History  of  his  Own  Time,  the  Arabian 
Nights,  Don  Quixote,  and  quite  as  many  more  books 
whose  names  it  would  be  tedious  to  enumerate. 
Curious  to  learn  something  of  the  further  progress 
of  this  extraordinary  experiment  in  education,  Sir 
Samuel  Bentham  wrote  asking  for  an  account  of 
his  reading  since  they  had  last  met.  The  solemn  boy, 
just  turned  thirteen  years  old,  consults  his  memory 
as  to  the  events  of  his  crowded  life  to  ascertain  how 
long  ago  that  meeting  was.  He  decides  that  it  was 
six  years  earlier,  and  begins  his  reply  as  follows  : 


152  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

My  DEAR  Sir, — It  is  so  long  since  I  last  had  the  plea- 
sure of  seeing  you  that  I  have  almost  forgotten  when  it  was, 
but  I  believe  it  was  in  the  year  1814,  the  first  year  we  were 
at  Ford  Abbey.  I  am  very  much  obliged  to  you  for  your 
inquiries  with  respect  to  my  progress  in  my  studies  ;  and  as 
nearly  as  I  can  remember  I  will  endeavour  to  give  an  account 
of  them  from  that  year. 

In  the  year  1814  I  read  Thucydides  and  Anacreon,  and, 
I  believe,  the  Electra  of  Sophocles,  the  Phcenissce  of  Euripides, 
and  the  Plutus  and  the  Clouds  of  Aristophanes.  I  also  read 
the  Philippics  of  Demosthenes. 

The  Latin  which  I  read  was  only  the  oration  of  Cicero 
for  the  poet  Archias,  and  the  (first  or  last)  part  of  his  pleading 
against  Verres.  And  in  mathematics,  I  was  then  reading 
Euclid ;  I  also  began  Euler's  Algebra,  and  Bonnycastle's, 
principally  for  the  sake  of  the  examples  to  perform.  I  read 
likewise  some  of  West's  Geometry. 

Aet.  9. — The  Greek  which  I  read  in  the  year  18 15  was, 
I  think,  Homer's  Odyssey,  Theocritus,  some  of  Pindar,  and 
the  two  orations  of  ^Eschines,  and  Demosthenes  on  the 
Crown.  In  Latin  I  read  the  first  six  books,  I  believe,  of 
Ovid's  Metamorphoses,  the  first  five  books  of  Livy,  the 
Bucolics,  and  the  six  first  books  of  the  ALneid  of  Virgil,  and 
part  of  Cicero's  Orations.  In  mathematics,  after  finishing  the 
first  six  books,  with  the  eleventh  and  twelfth,  of  Euclid,  and 
the  Geometry  of  West,  I  studied  Simpson's  Conic  Sections, 
and  also  West's  Conic  Sections,  Mensuration  and  Spherics ; 
and  in  algebra,  Kersey's  Algebra,  and  Newton's  Universal 
Arithmetic,  in  which  I  performed  all  the  problems  without 
the  book,  and  most  of  them  without  any  help  from  the  book. 

He  proceeds  to  enumerate  the  books  read  in  each 
subsequent  year — at  the  ages  of  ten,  eleven,  twelve, 
and  thirteen,  which  included  the  enormous  list  of 
classical  works  set  down  in  the  Autobiography.  Play- 
fair's  Trigonometry  and  Simpson's  Algebra,  Keill's 
Astronomy,  Robinson's  Mechanical  Philosophy  are 
read  at  ten  and  eleven.     At  twelve  he  read  Hobbes' 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  153 

Logic  and  several  Latin  works  on  the  same  science. 
Political  economy  followed  next  year,  and  he  wrote 
an  abstract  of  Ricardo.  He  also  began  to  write 
various  histories, — of  the  Roman  government,  as  far 
as  the  Licinian  laws;  of  the  United  Provinces,  from 
their  revolt  in  Spain  to  the  accession  of  William  III. ; 
and  some  poems,  including  a  tragedy.  The  general 
atmosphere  of  his  home — the  educational  pressure 
under  which  his  brothers  more  or  less  succumbed,  and 
which,  so  far  as  we  know,  bore  little  fruit  in  his  sisters 
(both  younger  than  himself) — is  brought  before  us  in 
the  concluding  paragraphs  of  this  letter : 

I  believe  my  sister  Willie  was  reading  Cornelius  Nepos 
when  you  saw  her.  She  has  since  that  time  read  some  of 
Caesar,  almost  all  Phaedrus,  all  the  Catiline,  and  part  of  the 
Jugurtlia  of  Sallust,  and  two  plays  of  Terence  ;  she  has  read 
the  first  and  part  of  the  second  book  of  Lucretius,  and  is  now 
reading  the  Eclogues  of  Virgil. 

Clara  has  begun  Latin  also.  After  going  through  the 
grammar,  she  read  some  of  Cornelius  Nepos  and  Caesar, 
almost  as  much  as  Willie  of  Sallust,  and  is  now  reading  Ovid. 
They  are  both  now  tolerably  good  arithmeticians  ;  they  have 
gone  as  far  as  the  extraction  of  the  cube  root.  They  are 
reading  the  Roman  Antiquities  and  the  Greek  Myt/iology,  and 
are  translating  English  into  Latin  from  Mair's  Introduction  to 
Latin  Syntax. 

This  is  to  the  best  of  my  remembrance  a  true  account  of 
my  own  and  my  sisters'  progress  since  the  year  18 14. 

I  hope  Lady  Bentham,  and  George,  and  the  young 
ladies  are  in  good  health. 

Your  obedient,  humble  servant, 

John  Stuart  Mill. 

Sir  Samuel  Bentham  invited  Mill  a  few  months  later 
to  accompany  him  on  a  visit  to  France.  He  was  not 
yet  fourteen  when  he  left  England.    How  completely, 


154  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

even  amid  all  there  was  to  see  that  was  novel  and 
interesting  and  to  learn  from  what  he  saw,  book- 
learning  was  still  the  one  ideal  and  serious  occupation 
we  see  from  Mill's  diary.  The  visit  was  an  opportunity 
to  learn  the  French  language  systematically — that  was 
its  chief  advantage  in  his  eyes.  The  following  extract 
from  Bain's  summary  of  the  diary  (Mill's  own  words 
being  in  inverted  commas)  may  be  taken  as  a  fair 
sample  of  the  whole. 

9th.  "Breakfasted  early  and  went  with  Sir  S.  and  Lady 
Bentham  in  the  carriage  to  Montauban  ;  took  a  volume  of 
Racine  in  my  pocket,  and  read  two  plays."  On  returning 
home  he  reads  a  comedy  of  Voltaire.  10th.  "  Before  break- 
fast, learnt  another  [French]  fable,  and  read  some  of  Virgil. 
After  breakfast,  wrote  some  of  my  Dialogue,  and  some 
French  exercises.  Wrought  some  of  the  Differential  Cal- 
culus. Read  a  tragedy  of  Corneille."  nth.  "  Learnt  another 
fable ;  finished  my  Dialogue.  If  good  for  nothing  beside,  it 
is  good  as  an  exercise  to  my  reasoning  powers,  as  well  as  to 
my  invention,  both  which  it  has  tried  extremely."  ..."  Wrote 
some  French  exercises  ;  began  to  learn  an  extremely  long 
fable.  Read  a  comedy  of  Moliere,  and  after  dinner  a  tragedy 
of  Voltaire.  Took  a  short  walk  by  myself  out  of  the  pleasure 
grounds." 

These  extracts  show  the  early  form  of  the  educa- 
tion mania  impressed  on  him  in  word  and  in  action  by 
his  father.  It  was  a  "  finishing  governess  "  very  much 
in  earnest  with  himself  and  with  those  committed  to 
his  care. 

One  trait  in  boyhood,  however,  which  is  more 
illustrative  of  Mr.  Gladstone's  saying  is  revealed  in  a 
letter  from  Lady  Bentham  to  Mill  the  elder,  written 
during  the  French  tour.  "  Upon  all  occasions,"  she 
writes,  "his  gentleness  under  reproof  and  thankfulness 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  155 

for  correction  are  remarkable."  She  adds  that  the 
correction  is  given  by  reasons  illustrated  by  examples, 
and  is  designed  to  subserve  his  education  for  M  com- 
merce with  the  world  at  large." 

In  personal  intercourse  Mill  appears  to  have  been 
much  what  we  should  expect  from  his  published  works 
and  his  letters. 

The  letters  of  his  mature  days  bring  before  the 
reader  very  little  of  Mill's  personality.  But  we  know 
from  other  sources  what  the  man  was  like.  Calm 
reasonableness  and  self-restraint  were  the  dominant 
notes.  Even  an  enthusiastic  admirer  like  Mr.  Bain 
leaves  us  under  the  impression  that  there  was  little  or 
no  personal  magnetism  at  first  meeting.  At  thirty-six 
Mill  is  described  as  tall  and  thin,  with  a  somewhat  bald 
head,  fair  hair  and  ruddy  complexion.  He  was  all 
through  life  a  great  reader,  and  he  read  either  walking 
up  and  down  his  room  in  the  East  India  Office  (of 
which  he  was  an  official)  or  at  the  standing  desk  at  which 
he  wrote.  His  expression  was  sweet.  His  voice  was 
thin,  almost  sharp.  As  he  spoke  there  was  a  constant 
twitching  of  the  eyebrows  which  arrested  attention. 
His  manner  of  conversation  was  cold  and  passionless 
as  a  rule.  In  his  twenties  he  did  not  always  impress 
people  as  a  talker.  "  Though  powerful  with  a  pen  in 
his  hand,"  writes  one  witness,  "  he  has  not  the  art  of 
managing  his  ideas,  and  is  consequently  hesitating  and 
slow  and  has  the  appearance  of  being  always  working 
in  his  mind  propositions  or  a  syllogism."  Even  later 
some  thought  his  conversation,  "though  remarkable 
enough  in  argument,  wholly  didactive  and  controversial. 
He  had  no  humour,  no  talk,  and,  indeed,  no  interest  in 
the  minor  concerns  of  life." 

Mr.  Bain's  own  account — that  of  an  enthusiastic 


156  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

disciple  who  from  long  experience  of  Mill's  astounding 
kindness  and  high-mindedness  saw  the  real  man  even 
amid  mannerisms — does  not  give,  I  think,  a  very 
different  impression,  and  his  denial  of  the  charge  that 
Mill's  manner — a  somewhat  hesitating  manner — could 
be  wearisome  suggests  the  saying  qui  s  excuse  s  accuse. 

Mill's  voice  was  agreeable  [he  writes],  although  not  speci- 
ally melodious  ;  it  was  thin  and  weak.  His  articulation  was  not 
very  clear.  His  elocution  was  good,  without  being  particu- 
larly showy  or  impressive ;  he  had  a  mastery  of  emphasis  ; 
his  modulation  was  sufficiently  removed  from  monotone,  so 
that  there  was  nothing  wearying  in  his  manner.  He  had  not 
much  gesture,  but  it  was  all  in  keeping ;  his  features  were 
expressive  without  his  aiming  at  strong  effects.  Everything 
about  him  had  the  cast  of  sobriety  and  reserve  ;  he  did  no 
more  than  the  end  required.  .  .  .  Although  he  did  not  study 
grand  and  imposing  talk,  he  always  aimed  at  saying  the  right 
thing  clearly  and  shortly. 

Mill  was  u  wanting  in  momentum,"  adds  Mr.  Bain. 
He  could  tell  a  good  story,  as  of  the  two  Frenchmen 
conversing,  both  of  them  by  nature  addicted  to  mono- 
logue. "  One  was  in  full  possession,  but  so  intent  was 
the  other  upon  striking  in  that  a  third  person  ex- 
claimed, '  If  he  spits,  he's  done.'  "  But  such  a  story 
was  told  as  an  interlude.  There  was  no  humour 
qualifying  his  general  conversation.  He  enjoyed  the 
pleasures  of  botany  and  of  scenery.  He  had  a  taste 
for  music  and  devised  tunes  for  some  of  Walter  Scott's 
ballads.  A  few  such  pleasures,  pale  and  restrained, 
did  apparently  make  him  smile.  But  on  the  whole 
the  impression  we  get  from  the  records  available  is  of 
laboured  and  almost  painful  earnestness.  Life  was 
for  him  a  most  serious  thing,  and  work  and  duty  were 
all  in  all.     His  favourite  quotation  was  "  The  night 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  157 

cometh  when  no  man  can  work."  Let  it  be  added  to 
this  picture  of  him  that  for  many  years  his  habitual 
dress  was  the  black  swallow-tail  coat  worn  in  the  'fifties 
by  clergymen  of  the  Church  of  England. 

The  collected  letters  nearly  all  belong  to  his  mature 
life.  They  are,  therefore,  imperfect  illustrations  of  a 
mental  history  which  began  to  be  interesting  at  sixteen. 
But  there  are  many  passages  in  them  and  in  the  brief 
diary  of  1854  indicative  of  what  I  have  said  of  his 
character  and  temperament.  And  I  will  set  down 
some  of  these  as  a  contribution  to  the  picture  of  Mill  in 
his  prime  before  speaking  of  the  development  of  the 
precocious  boy  into  the  man  who  so  strongly  influenced 
his  generation. 

The  pedantic  or  priggish  side  in  Mill  is  especially 
visible  in  his  letters  of  advice  to  those  who  consulted 
him.  The  following  was  written  to  a  boy  corre- 
spondent who  asked  his  opinion  on  corporal  punish- 
ment at  schools.  To  most  persons  the  subject 
suggests  some  genial  entering  into  the  ways  and 
habits  of  the  genus  "boy."  Not  so  to  Mill,  whose 
reply  has  the  dry  solemnity,  the  touch  of  pedantry 
which  impressed  Disraeli,  though  there  is  nothing  to 
be  said  against  the  advice  it  contains. 

1.  Severe  punishments  of  some  kind  are  often  necessary 
for  boys,  but  only  when  they  have  been  negligently  or  ill 
brought  up  and  allowed  to  acquire  bad  habits. 

2.  Assuming  severe  punishments  to  be  necessary,  any 
other  method  of  punishment  that  would  be  effectual  is  pre- 
ferable to  flogging.  In  the  case,  however,  of  certain  grave 
moral  delinquencies,  chiefly  those  which  are  of  a  cowardly 
or  brutal  character,  corporal  punishment  in  that  or  some 
equivalent  form  may  be  admissible.1 

1  Letters,  ii.  p.  48. 


158  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

Of  the  physical  distress  wrought  by  German 
obscurity  on  one  who  was  so  anxious  to  make  all 
things  clear  both  to  himself  and  to  others  the  illustra- 
tions in  his  letters  and  diary  are  the  more  impressive 
because  in  the  Autobiography  he  allows  somewhat 
greater  value  to  German  thought.1  The  letters  and 
entries  were  written  when  he  was  actually  suffering 
from  it.  In  his  diary  of  1854,  when  sighing  to  rescue 
men  from  misdirected  labour  and  useless  speculation, 
he  suggests  the  advisability  of  u  blotting  entirely  out 
the  whole  of  German  metaphysics." 

When  Bain  recommends  him  to  read  Fichte,  Mill 
communicates  to  his  friend  the  results  of  his  effort  in 
the  following  words : 

I  cannot  quite  make  out  why  you  advised  me  to  read  the 
Fichte.  I  find  nothing  at  all  in  it.  It  is  a  fanciful  theory  to 
account  for  imaginary  facts.  I  do  not  see  how  his  precon- 
scious  states  can  have  had  the  merit  even  of  suggesting  to 
you  or  Spencer  the  first  germ  of  what  both  of  you  have 
written,  with  a  real  science  and  philosophy,  to  connect  our 
conscious  with  our  purely  organic  states. 

To  the  same  correspondent  he  describes  the  quasi- 
physical  repulsion  produced  by  reading  Stirling's 
Secret  of  Hegel  and  Hegel's  own  writings  : 

I  have  been  toiling  through  Stirling's  Secret  of  Hegel.  It 
is  right  to  learn  what  Hegel  is,  and  one  learns  it  only  too  well 
from  Stirling's  book.  I  say  only  too  well,  because  I  found  by 
actual  experience  of  Hegel  that  conversancy  with  him  tends 
to  deprave  one's  intellect.  The  attempt  to  unwind  an  appa- 
rently infinite  series  of  self-contradictions  not  disguised  but 
openly  faced,  really,  if  persisted  in,  impairs  the  acquired  deli- 
cacy of  perception  of  false  reasoning  and  false  thinking  which 

1  Autobiography^  p.  139:    "Along  with  much  error  they  possessed 
much  truth,"  etc. 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  159 

has  been  gained  by  years  of  careful  mental  discipline  with 
terms  of  real  meaning.  For  some  time  after  I  had  finished 
the  book  all  such  words  as  reflection,  development,  evolution, 
etc.,  gave  me  a  sort  of  sickening  feeling  which  I  have  not  yet 
entirely  got  rid  of. 


We  may  remember  in  this  connexion  that  Mill's 
able  contemporary,  James  Martineau,  after  a  pro- 
longed study  of  German  metaphysics,  came  to  much 
the  same  conclusion  as  Mill,  a  fact  which  seems  to 
suggest  that  there  was  something  in  the  then  state 
of  the  intellectual  atmosphere  in  England  which 
made  obscurity  especially  unwelcome.  Men  were 
striving  with  the  intense  earnestness  which  char- 
acterized the  middle  of  the  last  century  to  see 
clearly  what  could  be  proved  as  a  legitimate  part 
of  human  knowledge.  They  longed  to  help  others 
and  to  be  helped  in  turn  by  a  clear  statement 
whether  of  agreement  or  of  divergence.  The  vague 
and  indefinite  were  in  such  circumstances  especially 
tantalizing. 

But  indeed  it  was  in  the  intellectual  candour  and 
reality  characteristic  of  that  time,  ministering  in  his 
own  case  to  a  passionate  desire  for  helping  mankind  to 
act  better  and  to  think  more  accurately,  that  Mill  was 
almost  without  a  rival.  The  candour  was  largely  an 
intellectual  virtue.  The  passion  for  truth,  and  the 
intense  feeling  as  to  the  duty  of  helping  his  fellow 
men  to  find  it,  meant  a  very  high  level  of  moral 
inspiration.  This  combination  of  the  intellectual  with 
the  correlative  moral  virtues  lay  at  the  root  of  Mr. 
Gladstone's  characterization  of  him  as  the  "saint  of 
Rationalism."  The  following  words  from  the  diary  of 
this   Agnostic   kept   in   the   year    1854    read   like   a 


160  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

passage  from  St.  Ignatius  Loyola  or  the  Imitation  of 
Christ. 

When  death  draws  near,  how  contemptibly  little  appears 
the  good  one  has  done !  how  gigantic  that  which  one  had  the 
power  and  therefore  the  duty  of  doing !  I  seem  to  have 
frittered  away  the  working  years  of  my  life  in  mere  prepara- 
tory trifles,  and  now  "  the  night  when  no  one  can  work  "  has 
surprised  me  with  the  real  duty  of  my  life  undone. 

Other  entries  in  the  diary  remind  us  how  com- 
pletely he  felt  it  to  be  his  mission  in  life  to  provide 
mankind  with  a  theory  of  life  to  replace  the  outworn 
beliefs  of  the  "theological  stage"  which  he,  like 
Comte,  regarded  as  a  phase  in  human  progress  which 
was  now  superseded.  The  following  may  be  quoted 
as  a  sample  : 

There  is  no  doctrine  really  worth  labouring  at,  either  to 
construct  or  to  inculcate,  except  the  Philosophy  of  Life.  A 
Philosophy  of  Life,  in  harmony  with  the  noblest  feelings  and 
cleared  of  superstition,  is  the  great  want  of  these  times. 
There  has  always  been  talent  enough  in  the  world  when 
there  was  earnestness  enough,  and  always  earnestness  enough 
when  there  were  strong  convictions.  There  seems  to  be  so 
little  talent  now,  only  because  there  is  universal  uncertainty 
about  the  great  questions,  and  the  field  for  talent  is  narrowed 
to  things  of  subaltern  interest.  Ages  of  belief,  as  Goethe 
says,  have  been  the  only  ages  in  which  great  things  have 
been  done.  Ages  of  belief  have  hitherto  always  been  religious 
ages  ;  but  Goethe  did  not  mean  that  they  must  necessarily 
be  so  in  future.  Religion  of  one  sort  or  another  has  been  at 
once  the  spring  and  the  regulator  of  energetic  action,  chiefly 
because  religion  has  hitherto  supplied  the  only  Philosophy  of 
Life,  or  the  only  one  which  differed  from  a  mere  theory  of 
self-indulgence.  Let  it  be  generally  known  what  life  is  and 
might  be,  and  how  to  make  it  what  it  might  be,  and  there 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  i6r 

will  be  as  much  enthusiasm  and  as  much  energy  as  there  has 
ever  been. 

How  little  present  reward  he  hoped  for  in  the 
pursuit  of  his  apostleship,  how  simple  was  his  desire 
for  the  good  of  the  race  and  not  for  his  own  fame 
or  success  in  furthering  it,  is  visible  in  many  passages 
in  the  letters  and  diary.  Sympathy  from  kindred 
spirits  he  did  value,  and  while  he  courageously  faced 
the  loneliness  which  a  thinker  ahead  of  his  time  had 
(as  he  considered)  inevitably  to  endure,  he  welcomed 
with  intense  thankfulness  the  appreciation  of  his  work 
which  he  found  in  his  own  home.  But  to  fame  he 
was  absolutely  indifferent  in  the  days  of  his  maturity, 
having  long  outlived  the  never  very  great  share  of 
ambition  which  he  had  in  boyhood. 

Two  interesting  records  of  this  attitude  of  mind 
are  to  be  found  in  his  correspondence — one  in  a  letter 
of  1865  to  F.  D.  Maurice,  the  other  in  his  diary 
already  referred  to. 

I  sympathize  [he  writes  to  Maurice]  with  the  feeling  of  (if 
I  may  so  call  it)  mental  loneliness,  which  shows  itself  in  your 
letter  and  sometimes  in  your  published  writings.  In  our 
age  and  country  every  person  with  any  mental  power  at  all, 
who  both  thinks  for  himself  and  has  a  conscience,  must  feel 
himself  to  a  very  great  degree  alone.  I  should  think  you 
have  decidedly  more  people  who  are  in  real  communion  of 
thoughts,  feelings,  and  purposes  with  you  than  I  have.  I  am 
in  this  supremely  happy,  that  I  have  had,  and  even  now 
have,  that  communion  in  the  fullest  degree  where  it  is  most 
valuable  of  all,  in  my  own  home.  But  I  have  it  nowhere 
else  ;  and  if  people  did  but  know  how  much  more  precious  to 
me  is  the  faintest  approach  to  it,  than  all  the  noisy  eulogiums 
in  the  world !  The  sole  value  to  me  of  these  is  that  they 
dispose  a  greater  number  of  people  to  listen  to  what  I  am 
able  to  say  to  them,  and  they  are  an  admonition  to  me  to 

M 


162  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

make  as  much  of  that  kind  of  hay  as  I  can  before  the  sun 
gives  over  shining.  What  is  happening  just  now  is  the 
coming  to  the  surface  of  a  good  deal  of  influence  which  I  had 
been  insensibly  acquiring  without  knowing  it ;  and  there  are 
to  me  many  signs  that  you  are  exercising  a  very  considerable 
influence  of  the  same  kind,  though  you  yourself  seem  to 
think  the  contrary. 

In  the  diary  we  read  : 

The  misfortune  of  having  been  born  and  being  doomed 
to  live  in  almost  the  infancy  of  human  improvement,  moral, 
intellectual,  and  even  physical,  can  only  be  made  less  by  the 
communion  with  those  who  are  already  what  all  well-organized 
human  beings  will  one  day  be,  and  by  the  consciousness  of 
oneself  doing  something,  not  altogether  without  value,  towards 
helping  on  the  slow  but  quickening  progress  towards  that 
ultimate  consummation. 

The  remedies  for  all  our  diseases  will  be  discovered  long 
after  we  are  dead  ;  and  the  world  will  be  made  a  fit  place  to 
live  in  after  the  death  of  most  of  those  by  whose  exertions  it 
will  have  been  made  so.  It  is  to  be  hoped  that  those  who 
live  in  those  days  will  look  back  with  sympathy  to  their 
known  and  unknown  benefactors. 

If  ever  there  was  a  man  whose  temperament  made 
a  religion  necessary  to  him  as  a  support  in  his  day's 
work  it  was  one  so  profoundly  pessimistic  as  to  the 
present  state  and  immediate  future  of  the  world,  so 
little  inspired  by  the  desire  for  fame,  and  yet  so 
scornful  of  the  bare  idea  of  living  for  personal 
pleasure,  so  exclusively  devoted  to  public  duty.  Yet 
by  an  irony  of  fate  John  Stuart  Mill's  early  education 
was  in  the  hands  of  one,  the  main  passion  of  whose 
energetic  and  able  intellect  was  directed  not  only 
against  Christianity  but  against  belief  in  God.  James 
Mill's  religious  history  is  related  in  his  son's  Auto- 
biography.     The   turning-point    in    his    rejection   of 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  163 

religious  belief  came  when  he  read  Bishop  Butler's 
Analogy.  Butler's  argument,  that  the  difficulties 
against  Christianity  were  analogous  to  the  difficulties 
against  believing  at  all  in  an  all-wise  and  all-good  ruler 
of  the  universe,  proved  in  the  older  Mill's  case  to  be 
a  two-edged  sword.  James  Mill  accepted  the  premiss 
that  Christianity  is  as  credible  as  Theism,  but  drew 
the  conclusion  that  Theism  is  as  incredible  as  Christi- 
anity. His  attitude  is  described  by  his  son  as 
Lucretian — not  one  of  indifference,  but  of  hatred.  He 
regarded  the  established  forms  of  religion  as  the  great 
enemies  both  of  progress  and  of  morality. 

Brought  up  in  this  atmosphere  it  was  long  before 

John    Mill    contemplated    the   possibility   of  turning 

towards  any  form  of  Theism  or  of  Christianity,  though 

his   temperament  and   his    view  of  the  world    cried 

out  for  religion.      He  tells  us  in  the  Autobiography 

that  he  regarded  Christianity  just  as  he  regarded  the 

paganism  of  ancient  Greece.      Neither  was  of  any 

present  concern  to  him.     Descartes  supported  himself 

while   elaborating  a  philosophy  of  systematic  doubt 

by  a  morale  par  provision — a  creed  which  included 

the  acceptance  of  the  current  religion  of  his  time  and 

country.     This  was  for  John  Mill  at  first  impossible. 

That  as  time  went  on  he  did  turn  towards  some  of 

the  beliefs  which  he  had  been  taught  to  despise,  we 

see  from  the  letters,   which  confirm  in  this  respect 

what  we  already  knew  from  the  posthumous  essays 

on    Religion.      His  ultimate  conclusion  was  on  the 

whole   in    favour  of  a    benevolent    Deity   limited  in 

power,  to  co-operate  with    whom   in   improving  the 

world  was  the  most  inspiring  motive  conceivable  for 

human  action. 

But,  at  an  earlier  time  he  cast  about  in  vain  for 


1 64  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

any  such  inspiring  motive  as  even  this  approximation 
to  Theism  supplied.  He  looked  for  inspiration  at  first 
in  some  ideal  object  for  which  he  might  live.  Three 
episodes  of  quasi-religious  inspiration  are  visible  in 
the  Autobiography.  The  first  was  his  reading,  in 
1822,  of  Dumont's  Traite"  de  Legislatio?i,  containing 
a  redaction  of  Bentham's  principal  speculations  which 
made  them  come  upon  Mill  with  a  new  force  and 
practicalness. 

It  gave  unity  to  my  conception  of  things  [he  writes],  I 
now  had  opinions,  a  creed,  a  doctrine,  a  philosophy ;  in  one 
among  the  best  senses  of  the  word,  a  religion  ;  the  inculcation 
and  diffusion  of  which  could  be  made  the  principal  outward 
purpose  of  a  life.  And  I  had  a  grand  conception  laid  before 
me  of  changes  to  be  effected  in  the  condition  of  mankind 
through  that  doctrine.  The  Traiti  de  Legislation  wound  up 
with  what  was  to  me  a  most  impressive  picture  of  human  life 
as  it  would  be  made  by  such  opinions  and  such  laws  as  were 
recommended  in  the  treatise.  The  anticipations  of  practicable 
improvement  we  studiously  moderate,  deprecating  and  dis- 
countenancing as  reveries  of  vague  enthusiasm  many  things 
which  will  one  day  seem  so  natural  to  human  beings,  that 
injustice  will  probably  be  done  to  those  who  once  thought 
them  chimerical.  But,  in  my  state  of  mind,  this  appearance 
of  superiority  to  illusion  added  to  the  effect  which  Bentham's 
doctrines  had  on  me,  by  heightening  the  impression  of  mental 
power,  and  the  vista  of  improvement  which  he  did  open  was 
sufficiently  large  and  brilliant  to  light  up  my  life,  as  well  as  to 
give  a  definite  shape  to  my  aspirations. 

The  second  inspiring  episode  was  his  visit  to 
France  during  the  Revolution  of  1830,  which  renewed 
his  early  dream  of  himself  as  a  "  Girondist  in  an 
English  Convention." 

It  roused  my  utmost  enthusiasm  [he  tells  us],  and  gave 
me,  as  it  were,  a  new  existence.     I  went  at  once  to  Paris,  was 


JOHN  STUART \  MILL  165 

introduced  to  Lafayette,  and  laid  the  groundwork  of  the  inter- 
course I  afterwards  kept  up  with  several  of  the  active  chiefs  of 
the  extreme  popular  party.  After  my  return  I  entered  warmly, 
as  a  writer,  into  the  political  discussions  of  the  time,  which 
soon  became  still  more  exciting  by  the  coming  in  of  Lord 
Grey's  Ministry  and  the  proposing  of  the  Reform  Bill.  For 
the  next  few  years  I  wrote  copiously  in  newspapers.  ...  I 
attempted,  in  the  beginning  of  1831,  to  embody  in  a  series  of 
articles,  headed  Tfie  Spirit  of  the  Age,  some  of  my  new 
opinions  .  .  .  the  only  effect  which  I  know  to  have  been  pro- 
duced by  them  was  that  Carlyle,  then  living  in  a  secluded 
part  of  Scotland,  read  them  in  his  solitude,  and,  saying  to 
himself  (as  he  afterwards  told  me),  "  Here  is  a  new  mystic," 
inquired  on  coming  to  London  that  autumn  respecting  their 
authorship,  an  inquiry  which  was  the  immediate  cause  of  our 
becoming  personally  acquainted. 

But  the  third  quasi-religious  influence  was  by  far 
the  most  potent,  namely,  the  friendship  with  the  lady 
who  became  Mrs.  Mill,  and  the  influence  on  him  of 
her  memory  after  death.  The  story  is  well  known. 
He  made  Mrs.  Taylor's  acquaintance  in  1831.  She 
was  then  but  twenty-three,  and  he  twenty-six.  He 
tells  us  in  the  Autobiography  that  he  used  to  compare 
her  at  that  time  to  Shelley,  "but,"  he  adds,  "in 
thought  and  intellect  Shelley,  so  far  as  his  powers 
were  developed  in  his  short  life,  was  but  a  child 
compared  to  what  she  ultimately  became."  Their 
friendship  ripened.  It  naturally  led  to  difficulties. 
His  father  accused  him  of  being  in  love  with  another 
man's  wife.  Mill  replied  that  his  sentiment  towards 
her  was  only  what  he  would  have  had  towards  a  man 
equally  able.  External  conventionalities,  however, 
were  not  attended  to  ;  and  Mill  was  criticized.  Such 
criticism  he  did  not  brook.  His  breach  with  Roe- 
buck, with  Mrs.  Grote,  with  Mrs.  Austin,  with  Miss 


1 66  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

Martineau  and  with  Lady  Harriet  Baring  was  in 
each  case  ascribed  to  their  allusions  to  the  subject.1 
Mr.  Taylor,  with  curious  chivalry,  understood  and 
accepted  the  exceptional  situation.  Mill  asked  none 
of  his  friends  to  visit  her.  But  he  passed  much  time 
in  her  society  and  she  became  the  absorbing  interest 
of  his  life.  He  regarded  all  he  wrote  as  an  inade- 
quate attempt  to  express  her  thoughts.  She  was 
probably  a  remarkable  woman.  Carlyle  speaks  of 
her  as  "vivid"  and  "iridescent,"  and  describes  her 
as  "  pale  and  passionate  and  sad-looking,  a  living 
romance  heroine  of  the  royalest  volition  and  question- 
able destiny."  Mill's  brother  says,  "a  clever  and 
remarkable  woman  but  nothing  like  what  John  took 
her  for."  Mr.  Bain  suggests  that  in  addition  to  the 
affinity  which  defies  analysis,  she  attracted  him 
intellectually  by  expressing  ideas  which  she  had 
really  learnt  from  him.  The  thoughts  he  cherished 
came  to  him  from  the  voice  of  the  woman  he  loved, 
and  he  did  not  realize  that  it  was  from  him  she  first 
learnt  them.  Whatever  the  explanation,  she  was  to 
Mill  the  object  of  a  passion  remarkable  for  its  purity 
and  intensity.  Twenty  years  after  their  first  meeting 
her  husband  died  (in  1851),  and  Mill  married  her. 
M  What  I  owe  even  intellectually  to  her,"  he  writes 
in  the  Autobiography,  "  is  in  its  detail  almost  infinite." 
When  after  the  few  years  of  their  union  Mrs.  Mill 
died  at  Avignon,  being  taken  ill  in  the  course  of  a 
journey  through  France,  the  remembrance  of  the 
friend  he  had  lost  became  the  dominating  influence 
and  inspiration  of  the  remainder  of  his  life. 

Since  then  [he  writes]  I  have  sought  for  such  alleviation  as 

1  In  the  case  of  Lady  Harriet  Baring  Mr.  Bain  is  not  quite  confident. 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  167 

my  state  admitted  of,  by  the  mode  of  life  which  most  enabled 
me  to  feel  her  still  near  me.  I  bought  a  cottage  as  close  as 
possible  to  the  place  where  she  is  buried,  and  there  her 
daughter  (my  fellow-sufferer  and  now  my  chief  comfort)  and 
I  live  constantly  during  a  great  portion  of  the  year.  My 
objects  in  life  are  solely  those  which  were  hers ;  my  pursuits 
and  occupations  those  in  which  she  shared,  or  sympathized, 
and  which  are  indissolubly  connected  with  her.  Her  memory 
is  to  me  a  religion,  and  her  approbation  the  standard  by 
which,  summing  up  as  it  does  all  worthiness,  I  endeavour  to 
regulate  my  life. 

The  inscription  on  her  tomb  at  Avignon  ends 
with  the  words  :  "  were  there  even  a  few  hearts  and 
intellects  like  hers  this  earth  would  already  become 
the  hoped-for  heaven."  She  had  helped  him  much 
in  the  book  on  Liberty,  which  he  brought  out  after 
her  death  with  the  following  dedication  : 

To  the  beloved  and  deplored  memory  of  her  who  was  the 
inspirer,  and  in  part  the  author,  of  all  that  is  best  in  my 
writings— the  friend  and  wife  whose  exalted  sense  of  truth 
and  right  was  my  strongest  incitement,  and  whose  approba- 
tion was  my  chief  reward — I  dedicate  this  volume.  Like  all 
that  I  have  written  for  many  years,  it  belongs  as  much  to  her 
as  to  me ;  but  the  work  as  it  stands  has  had,  in  a  very  in- 
sufficient degree,  the  inestimable  advantage  of  her  revision  ; 
some  of  the  most  important  portions  having  been  reserved 
for  a  more  careful  re-examination,  which  they  are  now  never 
destined  to  receive.  Were  I  but  capable  of  interpreting  to 
the  world  one-half  the  great  thoughts  and  noble  feelings 
which  are  buried  in  her  grave,  I  should  be  the  medium  of  a 
greater  benefit  to  it,  than  is  ever  likely  to  arise  from  anything 
that  I  can  write,  unprompted  and  unassisted  by  her  all  but 
unrivalled  wisdom. 

Grote's  remark  on  this  dedication  was  "  no  reputa- 
tion  but  Mill's   could  survive    it."     But  the  general 


1 68  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

verdict  of  his  friends  ultimately  was,  that  while  on 
this  one  subject  his  judgment  had  been  wholly  carried 
away  from  its  moorings,  it  remained  sane  and  reliable 
in  other  matters.  And  if  we  compare  the  lover's  vision 
with  the  reality  in  other  cases  this  will  appear  the 
fairest  verdict.  The  peculiarity  of  this  particular 
instance  is  that  whereas  such  judgments  are  generally 
hidden  in  the  privacy  of  domestic  life,  Mill  made  his 
views  public  and  associated  them  with  his  own 
writings,  which  were  then  so  much  before  the  eye 
of  the  world. 

But  while  the  memory  of  his  wife  was,  as  he  says, 
a  religion  to  him,  while  probably  the  thought  of  her 
was  that  which  filled  the  purely  emotional  side  of  his 
religious  nature,  so  inquiring  a  mind  could  not  rest 
without  a  desire  to  answer  the  great  questions  with 
which  religion  in  the^  ordinary  sense  is  concerned, — 
the  world  behind  the  veil  and  the  hope  for  the  future 
which  is  reasonable  for  mankind. 

And  it  is  possible  that  the  question  of  immortality 
took  a  new  colour  from  the  fact  that  one  whom  he  so 
deeply  yearned  to  meet  again  had  passed  from  this 
earth.  The  feeling  which  he  had  expressed  in 
reference  to  Sterling's  death  must  have  come  yet 
more  vividly  when  he  lost  one  so  far  dearer  than  even 
Sterling. 

There  are  many  signs  in  his  correspondence  that 
Mill  did,  in  the  years  following  the  death  of  his  wife, 
earnestly  desire  to  accept  a  form  of  Theism.  One 
of  the  most  interesting  letters  on  this  subject — written 
in  i860  to  one  who  submitted  to  him  some  speculations 
on  the  subject — may  here  be  cited  : 

It  would  be  a  great  moral  improvement  to  most  persons 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  169 

be  they  Christians,  Deists,  or  Atheists,  if  they  firmly  believed 
the  world  to  be  under  the  government  of  a  Being,  who,  willing 
only  good,  leaves  evil  in  the  world  solely  in  order  to  stimulate 
human  faculties  by  an  unremitting  struggle  against  every 
form  of  it. 

In  regard,  however,  to  the  effect  on  my  own  mind,  will 
you  forgive  me  for  saying  that  your  mode  of  reconciling  the 
world  as  we  see  it  with  the  government  of  a  Perfect  Being, 
though  less  sophistical  than  the  common  modes,  and  not 
having,  as  they  have,  the  moral  effect  of  consecrating  any 
forms  of  avoidable  evil  as  the  purposes  of  God,  does  not,  to 
my  apprehension,  at  all  help  to  remove  the  difficulty  ?  I  tried 
what  I  could  to  do  with  that  hypothesis  many  years  ago, 
that  a  perfect  Being  could  do  anything  except  make  another 
perfect  Being,  that  the  next  thing  to  it  was  to  make  a  per- 
fectible one ;  and  that  perfection  could  only  be  achieved  by 
a  struggle  against  evil.  But  then,  a  Perfect  Being,  limited 
only  by  this  condition,  might  be  expected  so  to  form  the 
world  that  the  struggle  against  evil  should  be  the  greatest 
possible  in  extent  and  intensity ;  and  unhappily  our  world 
conforms  as  little  to  this  character  as  to  that  of  a  world  with- 
out evil.  If  the  Divine  intention  in  making  man  was  Effort 
towards  perfection,  the  Divine  purpose  is  as  much  frustrated 
as  if  its  sole  aim  were  human  happiness.  There  is  a  little  of 
both,  but  the  absence  of  both  is  the  marked  characteristic. 

I  confess  that  no  religious  theory  seems  to  me  consistent 
with  the  facts  of  the  universe  except  (in  some  form  or  other) 
the  old  one  of  two  principles.  There  are  many  signs  in  the 
structure  of  the  universe  of  an  intelligent  Power  wishing  well 
to  men  and  other  sentient  creatures.  I  could,  however,  show, 
not  so  many  perhaps,  but  quite  as  decided  indications  of  an 
intelligent  Power  or  Powers  with  the  contrary  propensity. 
But  (not  to  insist  on  this)  the  will  of  the  benevolent  power 
must  find,  either  in  its  own  incompleteness  or  in  some  external 
circumstances,  very  decided  obstacles  to  the  fulfilment  of  the 
benevolent  purpose.  It  may  be  that  the  world  is  a  battlefield 
between  a  good  and  a  bad  power  or  powers,  and  that  mankind 
may  be  capable,  by  sufficiently  strenuous  co-operation  with 
the  good  power,  of  deciding,  or  at  least  accelerating,  its  final 


170  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

victory.  I  know  one  man  of  great  intelligence  and  high 
moral  principle,  who  finds  satisfaction  to  his  devotional 
feelings  and  support  under  the  evils  of  life,  in  the  belief  of 
this  creed. 

What  kept  Mill  from  a  nearer  approach  to 
Christianity  appears  to  have  been  partly  the  in- 
sufficiency of  such  Christian  apologetics  as  he  could 
find.1  Again,  his  moral  sense  revolted  against  the 
attitude  of  the  so-called  orthodox  in  regard  to  honest 
unbelievers.  This  enlisted  the  sentiment  of  moral 
approbation,  which  is  with  so  many  a  potent  force  in 
favour  of  Christian  belief,  on  the  opposite  side.  He 
considered  that  the  best  men  he  knew  were  among 
the  conscientious  unbelievers.  It  was  a  time  when 
the  anti-Christian  fanaticism  of  the  eighteenth  century 
had  given  place  to  something  very  different.  The 
sentiment  expressed  in  icrasez  Fin/ame  was  diametri- 
cally opposed  to  the  feelings  of  one  who  had  so  strong 
a  wish  to  believe.  The  orgies  of  the  mob  which 
placed  a  prostitute  on  the  altar  at  Notre  Dame  was 
the  vulgar  reflection  and  exaggeration  of  an  attitude, 
even  among  the  intellectual,  strangely  at  variance  with 
Mill's  dream  of  perfect  purity  to  be  obtained  by  man 
through  philosophy.  He  himself  had  no  passion 
against  Christianity.  His  passion  was  simply  for 
truth  wherever  it  could  be  found.  All  his  wishes  were 
on  the  side  of  definite  religious  belief.  Doubt  was 
the  sad  necessity  of  the  twilight  of  human  life.  He 
preached  in  prose  what  Tennyson  celebrated  in  poetry, 

1  So  far  as  Theism  is  concerned,  the  Essays  show  this.  On 
Immortality  we  have  a  pregnant  note  in  the  Letters  (ii.  381)  on  the 
"  bitter  disappointment  "  which  the  alleged  proof  brings  as  being  based 
on  the  assumption  that  "  the  facts  of  the  universe  bear  some  necessary 
relation  to  the  fancies  of  our  own  mind." 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  171 

the  moral  superiority  of  honestly  avowed  doubt  to  the 
shallow  profession  of  creeds  not  profoundly  or  intelli- 
gently— in  some  cases  not  even  sincerely — believed  in. 
Moreover  he  regarded  the  ideal  Theism  which  he  and 
many  of  his  friends  held  to — that  is  to  say,  belief  in 
the  duty  of  conforming  one's  actions  to  a  rule  approved 
of  by  an  ideal  God  whose  actual  existence  was  at  best 
uncertain — as  superior  morally  to  the  actual  Theism  of 
many  professors  of  Christianity  whose  conception  of 
God  was  not  moral,  who  conceived  of  Him  as  a  Being 
revengeful  and  unjust,  whom  they  nevertheless 
flattered,  in  the  fear  that  otherwise  He  should  punish 
them,  by  crediting  Him  in  general  terms  with  an 
infinite  and  absolute  goodness  which  in  particular 
actions  they  denied  Him.  It  was  in  this  connexion 
that  he  passed  his  well-known  comment  on  Mansel's 
analysis  of  the  character  of  the  Deity,  which  Mill 
regarded  as  belief  in  a  non-moral  God.1 

This  passage  made  an  immense  stir,  and  the 
approach  of  Christian  thinkers  to  understanding  Mill's 
views  was  signalized  by  the  fact  that,  although  some 

1  M  If,"  wrote  Mill  in  answer  to  a  criticism  of  Dean  Mansel,  "  instead 
of  the  glad  tidings  that  there  exists  a  Being  in  whom  all  the  excellences 
which  the  highest  human  mind  can  conceive  exist  in  a  degree  incon- 
ceivable to  us,  I  am  informed  that  the  world  is  ruled  by  a  being  whose 
attributes  are  infinite,  but  what  they  are  we  cannot  learn,  or  what  are  the 
principles  of  his  government,  except  that  "the  highest  human  morality 
which  we  are  capable  of  conceiving  "  does  not  sanction  them — convince 
me  of  it  and  I  will  bear  my  fate  as  I  may.  But  when  I  am  told  that  I 
must  believe  this,  and  at  the  same  time  call  this  being  by  the  names 
which  express  and  affirm  the  highest  human  morality,  I  say  in  plain 
terms  that  I  will  not.  Whatever  power  such  a  being  have  over  me,  there 
is  one  thing  which  he  shall  not  do — he  shall  not  compel  me  to  worship 
him.  I  will  call  no  being  good  who  is  not  what  I  mean  when  I  apply 
that  epithet  to  my  fellow-creatures  ;  and  if  such  a  being  can  sentence 
me  to  Hell  for  not  so  calling  him,  to  Hell  I  will  go."  (On  Hamilton, 
pp.  123,  124.) 


172  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

were  shocked,  several,  including  well-known  Roman 
Catholics,1  wrote  to  congratulate  him  on  his  protest 
against  such  depravations  of  Theism  as  extreme 
Calvinistic  doctrines  of  election  and  reprobation  were 
calculated  to  bring  about. 

J.  S.  Mill  had  none  of  that  natural  antagonism  to 
the  deepest  principles  of  Christianity  which  his  father 
and  so  many  others  have  had.  He  had  nothing  of 
the  pagan  in  him.  To  many  some  degree  of  emanci- 
pation from  the  strict  Christian  doctrines  on  purity 
and  on  humility  appears  necessary  to  make  one's  view 
of  life  really  adequate  to  the  length  and  breadth  of 
human  nature.  Christian  asceticism  appears  in  both 
these  matters  one-sided.  The  ideal  of  such  men  is 
Greek,  and  they  regard  Christianity  as  savouring  of 
Oriental  asceticism.  In  short,  they  deny  Tertullian's 
testimonium  animcz  naturaliter  Christiana.  To  Mill,  on 
the  other  hand,  the  morality  of  Christianity  did  appeal 
— though  its  external  evidences  did  not.  He  carried 
the  principle  of  self-denial  very  far.  As  to  purity  his 
ideal  was  far  more  Christian  than  Greek.  His  efforts 
on  this  subject  were  directed  towards  the  attainment 
of  an  ideal  perfection  which  to  ordinary  mortals  seems 
Utopian  for  the  majority  of  men.  His  intellectual 
modesty  had  in  it  much  in  common  with  Christian 
humility.  And  it  appears  again  and  again  in  the 
Letters  and  in  the  Autobiography.  Self  is  nothing ; 
the  great  cause  of  working  for  mankind  everything. 
He  cared  nothing  (as  I  have  said)  for  mere  fame.  He 
would  not  have  his  picture  painted.  He  declined  the 
honour  of  a  visit  at  Avignon  from  the  Princess  Royal 
(the  future  German   Empress).     He  shunned  society 

1  Among  these  was  my  father,  whom  Mr.  Herbert  Paul  curiously 
alludes  to  in  his  History  as  agreeing  with  Mansel. 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  173 

which  would  have  feted  him  gladly.  He  had,  indeed, 
very  deep  down  a  dislike  of  the  luxuries  and  the 
flattery  attending  on  a  great  social  position.  He  had 
something  of  the  saint  in  his  unworldliness  as  in  his 
asceticism.  u  We,  like  you,"  he  wrote  to  Mazzini, 
"  feel  that  those  who  would  either  make  their  lives 
useful  to  noble  ends  or  maintain  any  elevation  of 
character  within  themselves  must,  in  these  days,  have 
little  to  do  with  what  is  called  society." 

An  interesting  picture  of  his  life  in  his  little 
country  house  outside  Avignon  is  preserved  in  a  letter 
from  his  friend  Mr.  Thornton  to  Henry  Fawcett,  and 
it  brings  before  us  his  happiness  in  a  secluded  life,  in 
which  the  chief  physical  pleasure  was  the  lovely 
scenery  which  surrounded  him  : 

In  front  of  the  house  is  an  oblong  garden  with  an  avenue 
of  sycamores  and  mulberry  trees  down  the  middle,  and  at  the 
end  a  trellis-work  supporting  a  vine  which  serves  as  a  verandah 
to  the  dwelling.  This  is  a  small  square  building,  whitewashed, 
with  a  tiled  roof  and  green  Venetian  blinds  without,  and 
within,  three  small  rooms  on  the  ground  floor  and  two  on  the 
floor  above,  all  fitted  up  very  simply,  but  with  English  com- 
fort and  neatness,  and  a  mixture  of  French  and  English  taste. 
Two  of  the  lower  rooms  are  the  drawing-room  and  sitting- 
room,  the  third  is  my  bedroom,  at  the  window  of  which, 
looking  into  the  garden,  I  am  now  writing.  Above  are  the 
bedrooms  of  Mill  and  Miss  Taylor,  opening  upon  a  terrace, 
from  which  is  a  view  of  green  fields,  backed  by  ranges  of 
mountains  of  most  graceful  forms  and  constantly  changing 
colours. 

At  eight  o'clock  we  breakfast ;  then,  if  there  is  no  special 
plan  for  the  day,  Mill  reads  or  writes  till  twelve  or  one,  when 
we  set  out  for  a  walk  which  lasts  till  dinner-time.  In  the 
evening  Mill  commonly  reads  some  light  book  aloud  for  part 
of  the  time.     This,  I  fancy,  is  his  ordinary  mode  of  life  while 


174  MEN   AND  MATTERS 

here,  but  he  is  now  laying  himself  out  to  entertain  me,  and 
almost  every  other  day  we  make  a  long  carriage  excursion, 
starting  directly  after  breakfast,  and  driving  twenty  or  thirty 
miles  on  end  and  not  returning  till  sunset  or  later.  We  have 
already  visited  in  this  way  Petrarch's  valley  of  Vaucluse,  the 
Roman  monuments  at  St.  Remy,  and  the  curious  feudal 
remains  of  Les  Baux,  and  to-morrow  we  are  to  go  to  the 
famous  Pont  du  Gard.  Mill  tells  me  that  they  seldom  let 
a  week  pass  without  making  some  such  excursion,  but  that 
this  year  they  have  postponed  all  until  my  arrival.  You  may 
imagine  how  much  I  am  enjoying  myself,  and  no  small  part 
of  my  pleasure  consists  in  seeing  how  cheerfully  and  con- 
tentedly, if  I  may  not  say  how  happily,  Mill  is  living.  I  feel 
convinced  that  he  will  never  be  persuaded  permanently  to 
abandon  this  retreat,  for  here,  besides  the  seclusion,  in  which 
he  takes  an  almost  morbid  delight,  and  a  neighbourhood  both 
very  interesting  and,  in  its  own  peculiar  way,  very  beautiful, 
he  has  also  close  at  hand  the  resting-place  of  his  wife,  which 
he  visits  daily,  while  in  his  step-daughter  he  has  a  companion 
in  all  respects  worthy  of  him. 

I  have  dwelt  somewhat  fully  on  Mill's  search  for 
some  source  of  inspiration  to  take  the  place  of  the  old 
religions  which  he  regarded  as  untenable — because 
the  finding  of  a  Weltanschatmng,  of  a  philosophy  of 
life  and  adequate  ideals  of  action,  was  clearly  the  chief 
object  inspiring  his  own  work  and  life.  But,  of 
course,  his  writings  were  not — except  only  the  posthu- 
mous essays  on  religion — writings  on  the  philosophy 
of  life.  They  were  contributions  to  the  sciences  or 
to  the  political  problems  of  the  day.  The  Logic  and 
the  Political  Economy  still  hold  their  own  as  the  best 
expositions  of  those  sciences  given  us  by  any  thinker 
belonging  to  his  own  school  of  thought.  We  may 
decline  to  admit  that  syllogistic  reasoning  is  based 
on  induction,  or  that  "  necessary  truth "  can  be 
accounted  for  by  experience  ;    but  Mill's   logic  is  far 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  175 

the  best  produced  by  any  writer  of  the  "  experience  " 
school,  and  much  of  it  is  invaluable  to  readers  of 
every  school.  The  canons  of  induction  are  never 
likely  to  be  superseded.  Much  of  the  sociology  of 
the  sixth  book  has  permanent  value.  If  the  Political 
Economy  is  vitiated  by  the  assumption  that  men 
always  act  from  self-interest,  and  some  conclusions  are 
therefore  true  only  ex  hypothesi  and  not  in  real  life, 
this  defect  qualifies  the  value  of  only  a  small  part  of  a 
great  book.  The  Liberty  is  the  most  persuasive  and 
moderate  existing  exposition  of  a  theory  in  its  totality 
fallacious.  The  Examination  of  Hamilton's  Philosophy 
brings  to  an  issue  with  unrivalled  clearness  the  central 
points  of  debate  between  the  schools  of  experience 
and  of  intuition.  In  virtue  of  the  Logic,  the  Exami- 
nation of  Hamilton,  and  the  Liberty,  he  was  long  the 
acknowledged  leader  of  an  important  party  in  the 
world  of  thought.  The  Dissertations  and  Discussions 
are  carefully  made  selections  from  his  contributions 
to  periodical  literature,  and  there  are  among  them 
essays  of  the  highest  value.  Especially  notable  is  the 
essay  on  Coleridge  and  Bentham.  The  little  book 
on  Representative  Government  is  a  really  powerful 
piece  of  political  philosophy  which  has  been  weighed 
and  not  found  wanting  by  thinkers  of  many  different 
political  creeds. 

The  Letters  show  all  the  candour  and  indepen- 
dence in  treating  of  the  secular  questions  discussed  by 
his  contemporaries  which  are  visible  in  his  published 
writings.  The  resolute  and  honest  individualism,  the 
insistence  on  examining  for  himself  and  judging  all 
traditional  views,  those  of  his  own  party  as  well  as 
those  of  their  opponents,  which  led  Mill  to  make  such 
considerable  concessions  to  the  religious  party,  placed 


176  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

him  also  among  the  first  to  question  and  amend  long- 
standing verdicts  in  history,  lazily  acquiesced  in  by 
the  majority.  The  process  of  historical  reconstruction 
has,  of  course,  been  undertaken  much  more  thoroughly 
in  our  own  day.  But  Mill's  verdicts  are  often  still 
worth  reading.  The  following  brief  estimate  of 
Voltaire's  true  position,  as  contrasted  with  the  popular 
view  of  him,  may  be  taken  as  a  sample  of  many  fuller 
ones  : 

I  am  now  reading  very  sedulously  Voltaire's  correspond- 
ence :  I  never  read  it  before.  It  throws  much  light  upon  the 
spiritual  character  of  that  time,  and  especially  of  its  literary 
men.  How  strangely  Voltaire's  own  character  has  been  mis- 
taken ;  and  how  little  does  he  seem  to  have  been  conscious 
of  what  he  was  about,  to  have  had  even  any  settled  purpose 
in  it  He  certainly  had  no  intention  of  being  the  patriarch 
of  any  sect  of  destructionists,  and  if  the  priests  would  have 
let  him  alone  he  would  have  let  them  alone.  In  the  greater 
part  of  his  lifetime  he  seems  to  have  been  timid  excessively, 
and  would  have  abstained  from  almost  anything  in  order  to 
remain  quiet  at  Paris.  But  after  he  had  found  the  quiet  he 
sought,  at  a  distance,  it  was  the  revival  of  persecution — as 
evinced  by  the  suppression  of  the  Encyclopedia,  the  con- 
demnation of  Helvetius'  book,  the  speech  of  Le  Franc  de 
Pompignan  at  the  Academy  denouncing  Voltaire  himself 
personally,  the  success  of  Palissot's  comedy  of  Les  Philosophes, 
the  abuse  of  the  philosophers  by  various  persons,  etc.,  etc. — 
it  was  these  things  which  erected  Voltaire  after  the  age  of 
sixty-five  into  the  leader  of  a  crusade  against  Christianity ; 
and  it  was  then,  too,  that  he  seems  to  have  found  out  that 
wit  and  ridicule  were  capable  of  being  powerful  weapons  in 
his  hands.  He  always  seems  to  have  despised  the  French, 
and  thought  them  incapable  of  philosophy  or  even  of  science  ; 
and  he  continually  lamented  that  they  insisted  upon  taking 
to  speculation,  which  they  were  unfit  for,  and  neglected  the 
beaux-arts. 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  177 

But  when  all  is  said  as  to  the  value  of  Mill's  actual 
contributions  to  the  thought  of  his  own  day  we  are 
brought  back  to  Mr.  Gladstone's  verdict.     The  thinker 
was  greater  than  the  thought.     It  is  the  mental  and 
moral  quality  of   the   "saint  of  Rationalism,"  shown 
even  in   works  on   purely  philosophical  or  technical 
subjects,  his  infinite  candour  and  teachableness,  which 
gave  his  reputation  its  unique  character  in  his   own 
time  and  should  make  it  lasting.     The  rare  combina- 
tion of  assimilative  power  with  independent  criticism 
in  his  estimates  and  the  justice  of  his  verdicts  were  a 
powerful  talisman.     When  he  saw  that  the  Quarterly 
did  not  venture  boldly  to  recognize  at  its  worth  the 
rising  genius  of  Tennyson,  he  wrote  in  the  London 
and  Westminster  a  courageous  article  which  greatly 
helped  to  guide  popular  opinion  on  the  subject.     His 
recognition  of  Darwin's  Origin  of  Species — given  in 
one  of    the   published    letters — is    a    masterpiece  of 
balanced  criticism  which  could   hardly   be  improved 
upon    now  after  all  the  subsequent  ebb  and  flow  of 
scientific  opinion  on  the  subject.       His  criticisms  of 
Voltaire,  Machiavelli,  and   many  another  have  also 
the  freedom  of  an  absolutely   fair  and  independent 
mind  revising  popular  verdicts,  not  from  a  dislike  of 
acquiescing  in  established  views,  but  because  justice 
obviously  demanded  their  revision.     He  claims  with 
truth    in    the    Autobiography   to    have    been    "much 
superior  to  most  of  [his]  contemporaries  in  willing- 
ness and  ability    to    learn    from    everybody."      The 
strenuous  conservative  thinkers  of  that  earnest  day 
had  the  rare  satisfaction  of  seeing  their  views  appre- 
ciated by  the  "  rising  hope  of  the  stern  and  unbending  " 
Radicals  of  the  school  of  James  Mill  and  Bentham. 
Nay,  more,  they  found  him  avowedly  modifying  the 

N 


178  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

extreme  views  he  had  learnt  and  was  set  up  to  defend. 
They  witnessed  the  spectacle  in  all  ages  so  rare  of  an 
almost  professional  partisan  owning  to  half  conversion, 
yielding  to  argument  when  it  convinced  him,  and 
reforming  his  creed.  This  brought  him  into  close 
touch  with  thinkers  of  many  schools,  and  gave  him 
great  influence  far  outside  the  circle  of  his  own  direct 
followers. 

Hence  the  record  of  the  growth  of  his  mind  and 
character,  given  in  the  Autobiography,  and  copiously 
illustrated  in  its  later  stages  by  the  Letters,  is  a  more 
unique  tribute  to  the  greatness  of  the  man  than  any 
of  his  published  writings  on  technical  subjects.  '  In 
the  religious  bias  (above  referred  to),  which  reacted 
against  his  father's  atheism,  we  see,  perhaps,  the 
working  of  a  peculiar  temperament  which  sorely 
needed  religion.  But  the  story  of  Mill's  mental  pro- 
gress, as  a  whole,  testifies  to  an  almost  unique  com- 
bination of  moral  earnestness  and  intellectual  candour. 
And  these  qualities  touched  and  drew  to  him  the  true 
elite  of  every  creed  and  philosophical  school — the  salt 
of  the  earth.     Let  us  recall  the  outlines  of  this  story. 

He  admits  (as  I  have  already  noted)  to  having 
been  during  two  or  three  years  of  his  later  boyhood 
"a  mere  reasoning  machine."1  Benthamism  under- 
valued imagination  as  simply  misleading.  But  the 
Benthamite  creed  he  outgrew  before  he  was  twenty, 
and  spoke  of  it  as  "  sectarian  folly."  Plutarch's  Lives, 
Plato's  pictures  of  Socrates,  and  still  more  Condorcet's 
Life  of  Turgot  made  him  realize  a  wider  range  of 
ideas.  Turgot  disclaimed  solidarity  with  the  Encyclo- 
pedists as  sectarian.  And  John  Mill,  at  the  age  of 
eighteen,  ceased  to  call  himself  a  Benthamite.     His 

1  Autobiography,  p.  62. 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  179 

new  sense  of  the  value  of  the  cultivation  of  the 
imagination  and  feelings  came  in  the  mental  crisis  (at 
the  age  of  twenty)  in  which  he  was  rescued  from  the 
slough  of  despond  by  a  touching  passage  in  Mar- 
montel's  Mimoires.  He  suddenly  felt  that  the  realiza- 
tion of  all  the  objects  for  which  he  was  working  could 
not  bring  him  happiness.  "  The  whole  foundation  on 
which  my  life  was  conducted,"  he  writes,  "  fell  down 
.  .  .  I  seemed  to  have  nothing  left  to  live  for."  After 
six  months  of  misery,  during  which  all  zest,  and 
all  capacity  for  feeling,  seemed  to  have  left  him,  he 
was  deeply  affected  by  reading  the  sad  scene  in  which 
Marmontel  describes  his  father's  death,  the  sadness  of 
the  family,  and  his  own  sudden  inspiration  to  be  all  in 
all  to  them  and  to  fill  his  father's  place.  The  tears 
which  his  reading  drew  from  him  wrought  a  cure 
which  reasoning  had  failed  to  effect.  Life  seemed 
once  more  worth  living.  He  found  "  enjoyment,  not 
intense,  but  sufficient  for  cheerfulness,  in  sunshine  and 
sky,  in  books,  in  conversation,  in  public  affairs,"  and 
"excitement,  though  of  a  moderate  kind,"  in  working 
for  the  public  good.  He  took  the  lesson  to  heart. 
"  The  cultivation  of  the  feelings,"  he  tells  us,  "  became 
one  of  the  cardinal  points  in  my  ethical  and  philo- 
sophical creed." 

His  emancipation  from  the  sectarianism  of  his 
early  creed  made  it  then  essential  to  reform  his 
opinions,  and  in  this  task  he  displayed  his  extraordinary 
openness  to  influence. 

Wordsworth,  Coleridge,  Maurice,  Sterling  were 
only  a  few  of  those  whose  views  reacted  on  him.  Of 
Sterling  he  says,  "  He  and  I  started  from  intellectual 
points  almost  as  wide  apart  as  the  poles,  but  the  dis- 
tance was  ever  diminishing."     And   new  ideas  were 


180  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

not  allowed  by  Mill  to  remain  isolated.  They  meant 
further  labour,  for  they  had  to  be  worked  out  in  their 
effects  on  his  own  opinions  as  a  whole. 

I  found  the  fabric  of  my  old  and  taught  opinions  giving 
way  in  many  fresh  places  [he  writes],  and  I  never  allowed  it 
to  fall  to  pieces,  but  was  incessantly  occupied  in  weaving  it 
anew.  I  never,  in  the  course  of  my  transition,  was  content 
to  remain,  for  ever  so  short  a  time,  confused  and  unsettled. 
When  I  had  taken  in  any  new  idea,  I  could  not  rest  till  I  had 
adjusted  its  relation  to  my  old  opinions,  and  ascertained 
exactly  how  far  its  effect  ought  to  extend  in  modifying  or 
superseding  them.1 

Sterling's  own  appreciation  of  the  change  in  his 
friend  has  been  left  on  record  : 

He  has  made  the  sacrifice  of  being  the  undoubted  leader 
of  a  powerful  party  for  the  higher  glory  of  being  a  private  in 
the  army  of  truth,  ready  to  storm  any  of  the  strong  places  of 
falsehood  even  if  defended  by  his  late  adherents.2 

Mill  thus  exercised  an  immense  influence  on  behalf 
of  the  intellectual  candour  which  has  distinguished 
the  nineteenth  century  from  the  eighteenth.  This 
characteristic  was  handed  down  to  a  later  generation 
by  the  late  Mr.  Henry  Sidgwick — but  with  the  addi- 
tion in  the  Cambridge  thinker  of  a  certain  humorous 
pleasure  in  provisional  demolition  which  Mill  had  not. 
To  find  wanting  a  theory  which  was  seriously  and 
ably  advanced  was  ever,  I  think,  to  Mill  a  source  of 
regret.  The  above  named  characteristic  of  the  century 
is  described  by  Mill  himself  in  his  diary,  but  naturally 
with  no  reference  to  his  own  large  share  in  fostering 
and  increasing  it. 

1  Autobiography,  p.  go.  -  Courtney's/.  S.  Mill,  p.  73. 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  181 

In  the  last  age  (he  says)  the  writers  of  reputation  and  influ- 
ence were  those  who  took  a  side,  in  a  very  decided  manner,  on 
the  great  questions,  religious,  moral,  metaphysical  and  political ; 
who  were  downright  infidels  or  downright  Christians,  thorough 
Tories  or  thorough  democrats,  and  in  that  were  considered, 
and  were,  extreme  in  their  opinions.  In  the  present  age  the 
writers  of  reputation  and  influence  are  those  who  take  some- 
thing from  both  sides  of  the  great  controversies,  and  make 
out  that  neither  extreme  is  right,  nor  wholly  wrong.  By 
some  persons,  and  on  some  questions,  this  is  done  in  the  way 
of  mere  compromise ;  in  some  cases,  again,  by  a  deeper 
doctrine  underlying  both  the  contrary  opinions  ;  but  done  it 
is,  in  one  or  the  other  way,  by  all  who  gain  access  to  the  mind 
of  the  present  age  ;  and  none  but  those  who  do  it,  or  seem  to 
do  it,  are  now  listened  to.  This  change  is  explained,  and 
partly  justified,  by  the  superficiality  and  real  onesidedness  of 
the  bolder  thinkers  who  preceded. 

The  tendency  of  Mill's  age  here  described  is  to  be 
seen  in  one  of  its  aspects  in  Lord  Morley's  book  on 
Compromise,  in  its  deeper  form  and  with  a  predominance 
of  constructive  conclusions  in  the  works  of  Coleridge, 
and  later  on  of  F.  D.  Maurice.  To  Mill  it  was  so 
congenial  that  the  absence  of  it  in  such  partisan 
writing  as  that  of  Macaulay  made  him  almost  blind 
to  that  writer's  great  talent.  He  can  conceive  nothing 
more  damaging  to  the  age  in  which  he  lived  than  that 
it  should  be  "  estimated  by  posterity  as  the  age  which 
thought  Macaulay  a  great  writer."  It  was  an  age 
when  earnest  candour  was  specially  prized  among  the 
deep  thinkers.  And  it  was,  moreover,  an  age,  among 
the  intellectual  elite,  of  great  changes  of  religious  pro- 
fession at  the  stern  behest  of  newly  won  conviction. 
Carlyle  left  the  Calvinism  of  his  youth.  Martineau 
ceased  to  be  an  orthodox  Unitarian.  R.  H.  Hutton 
travelled  from  Unitarianism  on  the  opposite  road — to 


1 82  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

belief  in  the  Trinity  and  orthodox  Anglicanism.  New- 
man joined  the  Catholic  and  Roman  Church.  Maurice 
was  the  pioneer  of  a  new  theology  for  the  Church  of 
England.  Coleridge  and  Sterling  both  lived  to  hold 
very  different  views  on  life  and  religion  from  those  with 
which  they  began.  Mill  was  then  the  child  of  his  time. 
But  his  changes  not  only  evinced  his  supremacy  in 
the  intellectual  virtue  characteristic  of  the  time,  but 
had  in  them  something  of  the  special  quality  which 
attaches  to  the  story  of  St.  Paul,  for  his  inherited 
creed  was  not  neutral,  but  intolerant.  It  was  probably 
the  agreeable  surprise  he  experienced  when  he  found 
real  intellectual  greatness  in  the  defenders  of  views 
which  he  had  learnt  from  his  father  to  regard  as 
morally  depraved  and  intellectually  beneath  contempt, 
which  led  him  to  do  such  ample  justice  to  writers 
like  Coleridge  and  Wordsworth.  A  reader  of  the 
article  in  the  London  and  Westminster  Review,  on 
"  Coleridge  and  Bentham,"  finds  it  hard  to  realize  in 
fact  that  its  writer  was  once  a  professed  Benthamite, 
and  still  declared  Bentham  to  be  on  important  points 
nearer  the  truth  than  Coleridge.  One  of  the  most 
interesting  episodes  referred  to  in  these  volumes  is 
his  interview  with  Wordsworth,  described  in  a  letter 
to  Sterling  of  October  183 1.  It  shows,  for  the  time 
at  least,  an  attitude  of  more  distinct  dissociation  from 
radical  principles  than  readers  of  the  Autobiography 
would  expect  to  find  : 

I  went  this  summer  to  the  lakes,  where  I  saw  such  splen- 
did scenery,  and  also  a  great  deal  both  of  Wordsworth  and 
Southey  ;  and  I  must  tell  you  what  I  think  of  them  both.  In 
the  case  of  Wordsworth,  I  was  particularly  struck  by  several 
things.  One  was  the  extensive  range  of  his  thoughts  and  the 
largeness  and  expansiveness  of  his  feelings.     This  does  not 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  183 

appear  in  his  writings,  especially  his  poetry,  where  the  con- 
templative part  of  his  mind  is  the  only  part  of  it  that  appears; 
and  one  would  be  tempted  to  infer  from  the  peculiar  cha- 
racter of  his  poetry  that  real  life  and  the  active  pursuits  of 
men  (except  of  farmers  and  other  country  people)  did  not 
interest  him.  The  fact,  however,  is  that  these  very  subjects 
occupy  the  greater  part  of  his  thoughts,  and  he  talks  on  no' 
subject  more  instructively  than  on  states  of  society  and  forms 
of  government.  Those  who  best  know  him  seem  to  be  most 
impressed  with  the  catholic  character  of  his  ability.  I  have 
been  told  that  Lockhart  has  said  of  him  that  he  would  have 
been  an  admirable  country  attorney.  Now,  a  man  who  could 
have  been  either  Wordsworth  or  a  country  attorney  could 
certainly  have  been  anything  else  which  circumstances  had 
led  him  to  desire  to  be.  The  next  thing  that  struck  me  was 
the  extreme  comprehensiveness  and  philosophic  spirit  which 
is  in  him.  By  these  expressions  I  mean  the  direct  antithesis 
of  what  the  Germans  most  expressively  call  onesidedness. 
Wordsworth  seems  always  to  know  the  pros  and  the  cons  of 
every  question,  and  when  you  think  he  strikes  the  balance 
wrong  it  is  only  because  you  think  he  estimates  erroneously 
some  matter  of  fact.  Hence  all  my  differences  with  him,  or 
with  any  other  philosophic  Tory,  would  be  differences  of 
matter  of  fact  or  detail,  while  my  differences  with  the  Radi- 
cals and  Utilitarians  are  differences  of  principle  ;  for  these 
see  generally  only  one  side  of  the  subject,  and  in  order  to 
convince  them  you  must  put  some  entirely  new  idea  into 
their  heads,  whereas  Wordsworth  has  all  the  ideas  there 
already,  and  you  have  only  to  discuss  with  him  the  "how 
much,"  the  more  or  less  of  weight  which  is  to  be  attached  to 
a  certain  cause  or  effect  as  compared  with  others  ;  thus  the 
difference  with  him  turns  upon  a  question  of  varying  or  fluc- 
tuating quantities,  where  what  is  plus  in  one  age  or  country 
is  minus  in  another,  and  the  whole  question  is  one  of  observa- 
tion and  testimony,  and  of  the  value  of  particular  articles  of 
evidence.  I  need  hardly  say  to  you  that  if  one's  own  conclu- 
sions and  his  were  at  variance  on  every  question  which  a 
minister  or  a  Parliament  could  to-morrow  be  called  upon  to 
solve,  his  is  nevertheless  the  mind  with  which  one  would  be 


1 84  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

really  in  communion  ;  our  principles  would  be  the  same,  and 
we  should  be  like  two  travellers  pursuing  the  same  course  on 
the  opposite  banks  of  a  river.  Then  when  you  get  Words- 
worth on  the  subjects  which  are  peculiarly  his,  such  as  the 
theory  of  his  own  art,  if  it  be  proper  to  call  poetry  an  art  (that 
is,  if  art  is  to  be  defined  as  the  expression  or  embodying  in 
words  or  forms  of  the  highest  and  most  reformed  parts  of 
nature),  no  one  can  converse  with  him  without  feeling  that  he 
has  advanced  that  great  subject  beyond  any  other  man,  being 
probably  the  first  person  who  ever  combined,  with  such 
eminent  success  in  the  practice  of  the  art,  such  high  powers 
of  generalization  and  habits  of  meditation  on  its  principles. 
Besides  all  this,  he  seems  to  me  the  best  talker  I  ever  heard 
(and  I  have  heard  several  first-rate  ones) ;  and  there  is  a 
benignity  and  kindliness  about  his  whole  demeanour  which 
confirms  what  his  poetry  would  lead  one  to  expect,  along 
with  a  perfect  simplicity  of  character  which  is  delightful  in 
any  one,  but  most  of  all  in  a  person  of  first-rate  intellect. 
You  see  I  am  somewhat  enthusiastic  on  the  subject  of 
Wordsworth,  having  found  him  still  more  admirable  and 
delightful  a  person  on  a  nearer  view  than  I  had  figured  to 
myself  from  his  writings,  which  is  so  seldom  the  case  that  it 
is  impossible  to  see  it  without  having  one's  faith  in  man 
greatly  increased  and  being  made  greatly  happier  in  conse- 
quence. 

Of  Southey  he  writes  also  in  the  same  letter,  with 
appreciation  but  with  somewhat  less  of  sympathy,  as 
a  man  of  "  gentle  feeling  and  bitter  opinions." 

Mill's  general  conclusion  is  that  in  reforming  the 
world  he  could  ill  dispense  with  the  greater  minds 
among  the  "  speculative  Tories." 

If  there  were  but  a  few  dozens  of  persons  safe  (whom  you 
and  I  could  select)  to  be  missionaries  of  the  great  truths  in 
which  alone  there  is  any  well-being  for  mankind  individually 
or  collectively,  I  should  not  care  though  a  revolution  were  to 
exterminate  every  person  in  Great  Britain  and  Ireland  who 
has  £500  a  year.   Many  very  amiable  persons  would  perish,  but 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  185 

what  is  the  world  the  better  for  such  amiable  persons  ?  But 
among  the  missionaries  whom  I  would  reserve,  a  large  pro- 
portion would  consist  of  speculative  Tories :  for  it  is  an  ideal 
Toryism,  an  ideal  King,  Lords,  and  Commons  that  they 
venerate ;  it  is  old  England  as  opposed  to  the  new,  but  it  is 
old  England  as  she  might  be,  not  as  she  is.  It  seems  to  me 
that  the  Toryism  of  Wordsworth,  of  Coleridge  (if  he  can  be 
called  a  Tory),  of  Southey  even,  and  of  many  others  whom  I 
could  mention,  is  tout  bonnement  a  reverence  for  government 
in  the  abstract :  it  means  that  they  are  duly  sensible  that  it 
is  good  for  man  to  be  ruled  ;  to  submit  both  his  body  and 
mind  to  the  guidance  of  a  high  intelligence  and  virtue.  It  is, 
therefore,  the  direct  antithesis  of  Liberalism,  which  is  for 
making  every  man  his  own  guide  and  sovereign-master,  and 
letting  him  think  for  himself,  and  do  exactly  as  he  judges 
best  for  himself,  giving  other  men  leave  to  persuade  him  if 
they  can  by  evidence,  but  forbidding  him  to  give  way  to 
authority  ;  and  still  less  allowing  them  to  constrain  him  more 
than  the  existence  and  tolerable  necessity  of  every  man's 
person  and  property  renders  indispensably  necessary.  It  is 
difficult  to  conceive  a  more  thorough  ignorance  of  man's 
nature,  and  of  what  is  necessary  for  his  happiness,  or  what 
degree  of  happiness  and  virtue  he  is  capable  of  attaining, 
than  this  system  implies.  But  I  cannot  help  regretting  that 
the  men  who  are  best  capable  of  struggling  against  those 
narrow  views  and  mischievous  heresies,  should  chain  them- 
selves, full  of  life  and  vigour  as  they  are,  to  the  inanimate 
corpses  of  dead  political  and  religious  systems,  never  more  to 
be  revived.  The  same  ends  require  altered  means  ;  we  have 
no  new  principles,  but  we  want  new  machines  constructed  on 
the  old  principles  ;  those  we  had  before  are  worn  out.  Instead 
of  cutting  a  safe  channel  for  the  stream  of  events,  these 
people  would  dam  it  up  till  it  breaks  down  everything  and 
spreads  devastation  over  a  whole  region. 

One  word  must  be  said  concerning  Mill's  brief 
sojourn — between  1865  and  1868 — in  the  House  of 
Commons.     In  politics,  as   in  the  world  of  thought, 


1 86  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

it  was  his  frankness,  candour,  and  moral  elevation  that 
made  a  lasting  impression.  He  was,  as  I  have  already 
noted,  a  bad  speaker.  He  was  cold  and  not  fluent — 
often  pausing  for  a  painfully  long  interval  to  find  his 
appropriate  word.  Again  the  bonhomie  and  sym- 
pathetic manner  that  count  for  so  much  were  wanting. 
"  The  House  listened  to  him  with  respect,"  writes 
Mr.  Courtney,  "  but  he  seemed  like  a  man  who 
was  performing  a  difficult  and  disagreeable  duty  in 
addressing  it."  Nor  was  the  matter  of  his  speeches 
always  happy.  He  concentrated  his  main  attention 
on  questions  too  subtle  to  arouse  the  interest  of  a 
political  party.  In  this  he  seemed  to  the  average 
politician  something  of  a  faddist.  He  did  not  play  the 
game  of  party  popularity.  In  politics  as  in  other 
matters  he  was  severely  individualist.  In  religion  he 
had  stood  aloof  both  from  all  the  religious  sects  and 
from  the  sectarian  agnostics.  In  his  twenties  he  had 
branded  as  "  sectarian "  his  own  early  Benthamite 
creed  in  philosophy.  His  brief  party  alliance  with 
Comte  and  the  Positivists  broke  down  when  Comte 
formulated  his  full  creed  and  substituted  an  oligarchy 
of  men  of  science  for  a  democracy.  And  in  politics 
too  he  declined  party  shibboleths.  Even  before 
entering  the  House  he  had  discarded  under  the 
influence  of  patient  thought  some  of  his  earlier 
radical  views.  He  opposed  voting  by  ballot.  And 
while  desiring  an  extension  of  the  suffrage  he 
deprecated  the  undue  predominance  of  the  working 
classes.  He  was  optimistic  as  to  the  probable  effects 
of  education  in  gradually  fitting  the  British  work- 
man to  use  the  suffrage  wisely.  But  he  was  also 
apprehensive  as  to  the  probable  evil  which  the  political 
demagogues  would  work  in  corrupting  him  by  flattery. 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  187 

His  independent  attitude  when  first  asked  to  stand 
for  Westminster  was  very  noteworthy.  He  declined 
to  bear  any  of  the  expenses  of  election.  Not  Burke 
himself  at  Bristol  was  more  emphatic  in  declining  the 
very  shadow  of  dictation  from  his  constituents.  He 
refused  to  concern  himself  with  their  local  affairs. 
He  did  not  consult  them  as  to  the  measures  they 
might  desire  him  to  support  in  Parliament. 

He  told  them  his  views  and  said  in  effect,  "  Elect 
me  or  not  as  you  please.  I  am  totally  indifferent. 
These  are  the  views  which  if  elected  I  shall  advocate." 

Two  consequences  are  to  be  noted  which  had 
their  counterpart  during  his  career  in  other  fields 
besides  the  political.  First,  the  immense  courage, 
honesty,  and  moral  elevation  of  the  man  for  a  moment 
carried  all  before  it.  The  working  men  voted  for  the 
candidate  who  publicly  expressed  his  opinion  that  they 
were  as  a  rule  "  liars  "  ;  and  Mr.  Odger  declared  that 
they  desired  to  be  told  their  faults  and  not  to  be 
flattered.  And  the  House  of  Commons  itself  im- 
mensely respected  the  new  member.  Mr.  Gladstone's 
estimate  of  him  is  favourable  to  his  tact  as  well  as  to 
his  character.  "He  had  the  good  sense  and  practical 
tact  of  politics,"  he  writes,  "  together  with  the  high 
independent  thought  of  a  recluse.  .  .  .  We  well  knew 
his  intellectual  eminence  before  he  entered  Parliament. 
What  his  conduct  there  principally  disclosed,  at  least 
to  me,  was  his  singular  moral  elevation.  Of  all  the 
motives,  stings  and  stimulants  that  reach  men  through 
their  egoism  in  Parliament  no  part  could  move  or  even 
touch  him.  His  conduct  and  language  were  in  this 
respect  a  sermon."  Mill  made  some  speeches  that 
told,  and  used  some  phrases  that  stuck.  It  was  he 
who  coined  the  phrase  "  the  stupid  party"  as  applied 


1 88  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

to  the  Conservatives  and  defended  it  in  the  House 
as  successfully  as  he  defended  his  criticism  on  the 
labouring-  classes  outside  of  it :  "  I  never  meant  to 
say  that  Conservatives  are  generally  stupid.  I  meant 
to  say  that  stupid  people  are  generally  Conservatives." 
In  the  debate  on  the  Irish  Church  he  used  the 
memorable  sentence,  "  Large  and  bold  measures  alone 
can  save  Ireland." 

But,  secondly,  while  his  high  character  and 
startling  candour  struck  at  the  outset  a  strong  vibrat- 
ing note  of  sympathy  in  and  out  of  the  House,  such  a 
line  of  action  as  his  was  not  "  to  play  the  game  "  of 
practical  affairs.  A  public  assembly,  like  an  individual 
man  of  the  world,  is  liable  to  be  intensely  touched  for 
the  moment  by  nobility  and  quixotic  heroism.  It  will 
accord  to  it  a  generous  and  impulsive  recognition. 
But  this  attitude  does  not  last.  The  novelty  of  the 
spectacle  of  the  "  saint  of  Rationalism  "  in  Parliament 
wore  off.  His  speeches,  long,  technical,  ill-delivered, 
bored  the  House.  If  his  attitude  was,  as  Mr.  Glad- 
stone says,  a  sermon,  prolonged  sermons  weary  human 
nature.  Again,  he  did  not  quite  work  with  his  party, 
while,  as  we  have  said,  he  largely  ignored  his  con- 
stituents. An  independent  and  solitary  personality  is 
out  of  place  in  the  House  of  Commons.  When  the 
election  of  1868  came  Mill  was  defeated  and  returned 
to  the  more  congenial  surroundings  of  Avignon. 

I  think  that  his  parliamentary  career  suggests  as 
in  a  microcosm  some  important  causes  both  of  Mill's 
great  influence  and  of  the  subsequent  re-action  against 
it.  In  the  world  of  intellect,  as  in  that  of  politics, 
"the  Private  in  the  Army  of  Truth,"  as  Sterling 
called  him,  who  for  conscience  sake  gave  up  the  party 
of  which   he   had  been  leader,  aroused  a  degree   of 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  189 

admiration,  by  his  courage  and  honesty,  which  repre- 
sented too  high  a  standard  of  popular  judgment  to 
last.  The  Deists,  Anglicans  and  Roman  Catholics 
who  congratulated  him  on  his  candid  admission  of 
some  of  their  arguments  and  sang  his  praises  as  a  just 
man  in  whom  there  was  no  guile,  could  not  be  his 
thorough-going  supporters.  And  although  he  was 
still  the  unquestioned  leader  of  the  empirical  school 
in  philosophy,  his  followers  long  suspected  that  his 
attitude  was  not  so  iconoclastic  as  they  desired. 

Yet  so  long  as  he  lived  certain  causes  did  prolong 
a  popularity  unusual  in  its  nature.  The  high  moral 
character  and  acknowledged  eminence  of  the  recluse 
who  dwelt  at  Avignon  got  hold  of  the  popular 
imagination.  He  was  regarded  as  an  oracle  to  be 
consulted  by  young  thinkers  much  as  Carlyle  was 
consulted  by  them.  And  men  of  all  schools  would 
ask  his  advice  and  opinion  because  he  was  felt  to  be 
open  to  considerations  from  every  side.  He  was  the 
great  living  philosopher  who  taught  all  men  to  think 
candidly.  Apart  from  the  views  he  represented  he 
was,  as  Lord  Morley  has  said,  eminently  one  who 
helped  others  to  think  deeply  and  truly.  Again  he 
still  had,  up  to  his  death  in  1873,  a  verv  powerful 
following  as  a  philosopher,  and  still  did  represent  an 
important  school  of  thought,  though  not  the  Bentha- 
mite school  as  understood  by  his  father.  To  many 
negative  thinkers  his  arguments  appeared  all  the  more 
powerful  and  conclusive  from  his  candour  in  re- 
cognizing the  views  of  philosophical  opponents.  The 
Logic  and  the  Examination  of  Sir  W.  Hamilton  s 
Philosophy  remained  as  thorough-going  expositions 
of  the  empirical  theory  of  knowledge.  If  he  was  no 
longer  an  out-and-out  Benthamite  he  still  represented 


190  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

the  philosophy  of  Hume  and  of  his  agnostic  successors. 
Thus  he  was  at  once  a  great  living  oracle,  and  the 
leader  of  a  powerful  school  of  philosophy. 

Both  these  sources  of  influence  came  to  an  end  in 
1874.  His  death  in  1873  destroyed  the  first.  The 
publication  of  the  posthumous  Essays  on  Religion  in 
1874  destroyed  the  second.  Men  like  the  present 
Lord  Morley  and  Mr.  Leslie  Stephen,  who  had 
hitherto  stuck  to  Mill  though  they  recognized  in 
him  greater  sympathy  than  they  themselves  had  with 
the  religious  party,  could  no  longer  feel  him  to  be 
their  leader  after  these  essays  appeared.  Perhaps 
the  essays  recorded  no  fundamental  change  in  Mill's 
views  as  they  had  been  rumoured  in  private  conversa- 
tion. Indeed,  Mill's  letters  show  that  this  must  have 
been  so.  But  there  had  hitherto  been  vacillation  ;  and 
while  to  some  he  had  expressed  his  sense  of  the  moral 
value  of  belief  in  Theism  and  Immortality,  he  had  to 
others  laid  stress  on  the  sufficiency  for  mankind  of  a 
religion  of  duty  and  humanity — akin  to  Positivism 
though  divested  of  its  extravagances. 

But  now  a  clear  note  was  publicly  sounded  ex- 
pressing the  insufficiency  of  any  religion  which  did  not 
contemplate  the  world  beyond  the  veil.  The  pride  of 
agnosticism  was  humbled.  The  jubilant  note  expected 
from  a  leader  of  the  negative  school  was  replaced  by 
its  opposite.  It  was  in  the  third  essay  that  the 
matter  for  offence  was  found.  He  went  no  further  in 
it  than  to  admit  a  certain  scientific  value  for  reasons 
on  behalf  of  the  probability  of  that  qualified  Theism  I 
have  already  described,  and  of  a  survival  of  the  spirit 
after  death  as  its  correlative.  But  two  things  were 
new  ;  and  these  were  decisive  in  their  effect  on  his 
former  followers.     First,  he  encouraged  a  religion  of 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  191 

hope  and  imagination  in  excess  of  the  actual  evidence. 
Secondly,  his  language  concerning  Christ  was  in  the 
highest  degree  startling  to  such  men  as  Mr.  John 
Morley  (as  he  then  was)  and  Mr.  Bain,  still  more  to 
Mr.  Huxley  and  Mr.  Spencer,  who  were  profoundly 
out  of  sympathy  with  Christianity  and  at  war  with  its 
professed  adherents. 

On  Theism  and  Immortality  Mill  wrote  as 
follows : 

To  me  it  seems  that  human  life,  small  and  confined  as  it 
is,  and  as,  considered  merely  in  the  present,  it  is  likely  to 
remain  even  when  the  progress  of  material  and  moral  im- 
provement may  have  freed  it  from  the  greater  part  of  its 
present  calamities,  stands  greatly  in  need  of  any  wider  range 
and  greater  height  of  aspiration  for  itself  and  its  destination, 
which  the  exercise  of  imagination  can  yield  to  it  without 
running  counter  to  the  evidence  of  fact ;  and  that  it  is  a  part 
of  wisdom  to  make  the  most  of  any,  even  small,  probabilities 
on  this  subject,  which  furnish  imagination  with  any  footing 
to  support  itself  upon.  And  I  am  satisfied  that  the  cultiva- 
tion of  such  a  tendency  in  the  imagination,  provided  it  goes 
on  pari  passu  with  the  cultivation  of  severe  reason,  has  no 
necessary  tendency  to  pervert  the  judgment ;  but  that  it  is 
possible  to  form  a  perfectly  sober  estimate  of  the  evidences 
on  both  sides  of  a  question  and  yet  to  let  the  imagination 
dwell  by  preference  on  those  possibilities,  which  are  at  once 
the  most  comforting  and  the  most  improving,  without  in  the 
least  degree  overrating  the  solidity  of  the  grounds  for  expect- 
ing that  these  rather  than  any  others  will  be  the  possibilities 
actually  realized.  ...  It  appears  to  me  that  the  indulgence 
of  hope  with  regard  to  the  government  of  the  universe  and 
the  destiny  of  man  after  death,  while  we  recognize  as  a  clear 
truth  that  we  have  no  ground  for  more  than  a  hope,  is  legiti- 
mate and  philosophically  defensible.  The  beneficial  effect  of 
such  a  hope  is  far  from  trifling.  It  makes  life  and  human 
nature  a  far  greater  thing  to  the  feelings,  and  gives  greater 


192  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

strength  as  well  as  greater  solemnity  to  all  the  sentiments 
which  are  awakened  in  us  by  our  fellow-creatures  and  by 
mankind  at  large.  It  allays  the  sense  of  that  irony  of  nature 
which  is  so  painfully  felt  when  we  see  the  exertions  and 
sacrifices  of  a  life  culminating  in  the  formation  of  a  wise  and 
noble  mind,  only  to  disappear  from  the  world  when  the  time 
has  just  arrived  at  which  the  world  seems  about  to  begin 
reaping  the  benefit  of  it.  The  truth  that  life  is  short  and  art 
is  long  is  from  of  old  one  of  the  most  discouraging  parts  of 
our  condition  ;  this  hope  admits  the  possibility  that  the  art 
employed  in  improving  and  beautifying  the  soul  itself  may 
avail  for  good  in  some  other  life,  even  when  seemingly  useless 
for  this.  But  the  benefit  consists  less  in  the  presence  of  any 
specific  hope  than  in  the  enlargement  of  the  general  scale  of 
the  feelings  ;  the  loftier  aspirations  being  no  longer  in  the 
same  way  checked  and  kept  down  by  a  sense  of  the  insignifi- 
cance of  human  life — by  the  disastrous  feeling  of  "  not  worth 
while."  The  gain  obtained  in  the  increased  inducement  to 
cultivate  the  improvement  of  character  up  to  the  end  of  life, 
is  obvious  without  being  specified. 

The  passage  on  the  personality  of  Christ  is  well 
known.  The  sting  was  to  be  found  in  its  conclusion, 
which  may  therefore  be  here  set  down  : 

When  this  pre-eminent  genius  is  combined  with  the  quali- 
ties of  probably  the  greatest  moral  reformer  and  martyr  to  that 
mission  who  ever  existed  upon  earth,  religion  cannot  be  said 
to  have  made  a  bad  choice  in  pitching  on  this  man  as  the 
ideal  representative  and  guide  of  humanity  ;  nor,  even  now, 
would  it  be  easy,  even  for  an  unbeliever,  to  find  a  better 
translation  of  the  rule  of  virtue  from  the  abstract  into  the 
concrete  than  to  endeavour  so  to  live  that  Christ  would 
approve  our  life.  When  to  this  we  add  that,  to  the  concep- 
tion of  the  rational  sceptic,  it  remains  a  possibility  that  Christ 
actually  was  what  he  supposed  himself  to  be — not  indeed 
God,  for  he  never  made  the  smallest  pretension  to  that  cha- 
racter .  .  .  but  a  man  charged  with  a  special,  express  and 
unique  commission  from  God  to  lead  mankind  to  truth  and 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  193 

virtue  ;  we  may  well  conclude  that  the  influences  of  religion 
on  the  character  which  will  remain  after  rational  criticism  has 
done  its  utmost  against  the  evidences  of  religion  are  well 
worth  preserving,  and  that  what  they  lack  in  direct  strength 
as  compared  with  those  of  a  firmer  belief,  is  more  than  com- 
pensated by  the  greater  truth  and  rectitude  of  the  morality 
they  sanction. 

The  change  wrought  by  these  passages  in  Mill's 
position  with  many  of  his  old  followers  was  parallel  to 
the  change  in  sentiment  among  enlightened  Catholics 
towards  a  recently  declared  Modernist.  As  long  as 
such  a  writer  accepts  Catholic  dogma  and  respects 
ecclesiastical  authority,  while  he  strenuously  endeavours 
to  reconcile  the  acknowledged  results  of  modern 
criticism  with  his  religion,  the  abler  Catholic  readers 
are  proud  of  his  genius  and  open-mindedness.  They 
regard  him  as  the  pioneer  of  an  enlightened  theology. 
But  let  him  clearly  overpass  the  lines  of  orthodoxy 
and  there  is  a  terrible  reaction.  His  great  position  is 
gone  in  an  instant.  Thus  Lamennais  fell,  from  an 
eminence  which  was  compared  by  Lacordaire  to 
Bossuet's,  to  the  insignificance  of  the  beggary  in  which 
he  died.  The  former  followers  of  the  Modernist 
are  bitter — the  more  so  because  they  had  defended 
him  as  orthodox.  They  took  him  to  depict  the 
Christian  Church  as  wise  and  comprehensive,  ready 
to  assimilate  all  truth.  He  is  now  seen  to  have  been 
in  reality  depicting  a  Christianity  which  is  discredited 
and  can  only  be  saved  from  positive  destruction  by 
the  general  adoption  of  his  own  personal  views. 

Something  like  this  in  kind,  though  far  less 
extreme  in  degree  and  in  its  consequences,  happened 
to  Mill.  So  long  the  acknowledged  defender  of  a 
negative  philosophy  of  the  sufficiency  of  enlightened 


194  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

reason  and  imagination  to  supply  the  place  of  the 
old  religions,  he  now  appeared  in  a  new  light. 
The  emancipated  intellect  of  the  nineteenth  century 
was  no  longer  in  his  pages  proud  and  erect,  jubilant 
as  to  its  achievements  and  prospects  ;  it  was  prostrate 
and  humbled  at  the  recognition  of  an  ignorance  that 
could  never  be  dispelled.  Mill  seemed  to  cast  wistful 
and  longing  eyes  at  the  ancient  creed,  towards  which 
his  followers  were  so  supercilious.  There  was  no  note 
of  confidence,  of  leadership.     He  was 

An  infant  crying  in  the  night, 
An  infant  crying  for  the  light, 
And  with  no  language  but  a  cry. 

Many  of  us  still  remember  the  shock  which  this 
essay  created.  Mr.  Leslie  Stephen  was  reported  to 
have  paced  the  room  in  indignation  which  could  not 
be  contained,  while  his  wife  yet  further  angered  him 
by  the  poor  consolation  of  "  I  told  you  so.  I  always 
said  John  Mill  was  orthodox."  Mr.  John  Morley,  in 
the  Fortnightly,  did  not  disguise  his  profound  dis- 
appointment. This  was  not  the  Mill  whose  hench- 
man he  had  been,  and  whose  praises  he  had  sung  so 
enthusiastically  only  a  year  earlier  on  the  occasion 
of  his  death.  Mr.  W.  L.  Courtney  testifies  to  the 
"consternation"  caused  "among  those  of  Mill's  dis- 
ciples who  had  fed  themselves  on  his  earlier  work  " 
by  an  essay  which  seemed  to  recommend  the  renuncia- 
tion of  reason  in  favour  of  the  twilight  of  faith.  The 
religious  press  was,  of  course,  jubilant.  And  the 
religious  party  scored  heavily  in  a  long-standing 
combat. 

Almost  contemporaneously  with  the  shock  of  1874 
came   another    cause    of    the    declension    of    Mill's 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  195 

ascendency  in  the  rapid  growth  in  influence  of  the 
evolution  philosophy.  Mill  had  fully  recognized 
historical  evolution  as  formulated  by  Comte.  But 
even  this  was  not  one  of  his  special  subjects.  And 
the  application  of  the  theory  to  philosophy  proper  was 
first  made  and  with  extraordinary  thoroughness  by 
Herbert  Spencer.  This  was  a  second  reason  which 
led  the  negative  thinkers  to  turn  for  guidance  from 
the  man  who  had  betrayed  them  in  the  theological 
controversy  to  another.  In  the  'eighties  Herbert 
Spencer  enjoyed  much  of  the  popularity  which  had 
once  been  Mill's. 

Then  came  the  new  influence  of  German  philo- 
sophy in  England,  especially  of  Hegel.  Mill  had, 
on  the  whole,  despised  Hegel  and  Fichte.  And  the 
followers  of  the  great  Germans  now  had  their  revenge. 
The  thought  of  Oxford  had  been  largely  ruled  by  Mill 
in  the  'sixties.  In  the  'eighties  T.  H.  Green's  alliance 
with  his  more  orthodox  Anglican  pupils  established 
the  predominance  of  a  philosophy  based  largely  on 
Hegel.  And  the  Hegelians  were  quick  to  retaliate 
with  the  very  note  of  contempt  once  sounded  in  their 
own  regard  by  Mill.  Hegel  stood  far  more  widely 
apart  from  Mill  than  from  Spencer,  with  whom,  indeed, 
as  with  Comte,  the  German  has  real  points  of  affinity. 
With  the  change  of  dynasty  came  a  great  change  in 
fashionable  modes  of  thought.  Mr.  Balfour  decried 
Mill's  "  thin  lucidity."  The  passion  for  clearness  in 
expression,  which  still  remained  unabated  in  Huxley 
and  largely  in  Spencer  himself,  gave  place  in  the 
disciples  of  Green  to  a  certain  reverence  for  obscurity. 
While  in  science  proper  and  in  historical  criticism 
lucidity  was  still  recognized  as  a  virtue  and  men 
worked  together  to  reach  definite  scientific  results,  in 


196  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

higher  thought  a  certain  scepticism  as  to  the  value  of 
human  reason  supervened,  with  faith  as  its  correlative. 
Dim,  half-expressed  intuitions  of  deep  truths  com- 
manded respect.  Clearness  was  supposed  to  mean 
that  the  mind  moved  on  a  plane  far  below  the  highest 
problems.  Philosophy  itself  became  largely  a  faith 
though  illustrated  and  developed  by  reason.  The  new 
attitude,  which  still  largely  survives,  issued  in  its  best 
exponents  in  some  very  suggestive  and  powerful 
thought.  But  in  the  rank  and  file  it  had  grave 
disadvantages.  The  common  measure  of  minds,  to 
which  Mill  and  his  contemporaries  had  appealed  in 
their  dialectics,  was  disregarded,  and  no  satisfactory 
test  distinguishing  seer  from  charlatan  was  substituted. 
A  subtle  contempt  became  the  average  critic's  weapon 
of  attack  in  place  of  the  frank  debates  of  an  earlier 
day.  The  critic  posed  as  a  specialist,  addressing  out- 
siders, on  subjects  in  which  no  consensus  of  specialists 
was  in  point  of  fact  attainable.  Criticism  became  very 
unperceiving,  and  was  often  shielded  from  being  itself 
in  turn  fatally  criticized  by  being  wholly  unintelligible, 
or  at  least  by  using  as  a  loophole  for  escape  an  ambi- 
guity which  made  not  worth  while  any  strenuous  pursuit 
of  views  which  if  run  to  earth  would  be  disavowed. 
Something  startling,  something  new,  or  something 
indefinable,  was  needed  to  satisfy  or  at  least  to  please 
the  palate  of  a  somewhat  jaded  generation.  What 
was  quite  clear  and  generally  persuasive  was  ipso  f ado 
discredited,  as  not  only  shallow  but  unworthy  of  being 
said  at  all.  The  antithesis  to  the  ways  and  manners 
of  Mill  was  complete.  The  old  painstaking  discussion 
in  which  you  had  first  to  prove  your  own  capacity  by 
restating  an  opponent's  case  and  thus  showing  that 
you  understood   it,  was  no  longer  thought  of.     The 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  197 

critics  of  whom  I  speak  were  too  often  incapable  of 
it.  But  they  absolved  themselves  from  all  risk  of 
detection  by  disparaging  such  a  procedure  as  a  descent 
from  the  heights  on  which  alone  true  philosophic 
contemplation  was  possible. 

It  is  this  modern  repudiation  of  really  adequate 
analysis,  this  making  professed  analysis  almost  as 
obscure  as  what  is  analyzed,  which  has  been  the  coup 
de  grace  to  Mill's  influence.  It  is  this  which  makes 
his  philosophy  now  so  little  read.  Yet  so  exaggerated 
a  depreciation  of  candid  and  clear  and  often  penetrat- 
ing thought  cannot  last.  Already  there  are  whispers 
that  even  the  Germans  are  puzzled  at  the  uncritical 
worship  in  England  of  what  they  have  themselves 
found  seriously  wanting ;  and  Oxford  is  spoken  of  as 
the  place  where  good  German  philosophies  go  to 
when  they  die.  Moreover,  where  the  world  of 
fact  is  concerned  there  is  always  a  touchstone  which 
brings  thought  back  to  reality.  Thus  while  the 
Examination  of  Hamilton  and  most  of  the  Logic  have 
long  been  quite  neglected,  students  of  political 
economy  have  never  wholly  ceased  to  read  Mill ;  and 
the  wisdom  of  many  of  his  political  utterances  has 
recently  been  brought  back  to  us  with  new  power  by 
the  circumstances  of  the  time,  just  as  Burke's  speeches 
of  one  hundred  and  fifty  years  ago  are  being  read 
with  fresh  interest.  The  Liberty  and  the  treatise  on 
Representative  Government  are  nearly  as  valuable  now 
as  they  ever  were.  When  he  comes  to  be  widely 
read  again  I  believe  Mill  will  be  permanently  recog- 
nized not  indeed  as  a  great  constructive  thinker,  but 
as  a  very  great  critical  thinker,  with  the  rare  accom- 
panying quality  of  remarkable  sympathetic  under- 
standing.      He    himself    did   not    believe   that    the 


i98  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

individual  thinker  was  likely  to  reach  finality  in  treat- 
ing of  the  greatest  problems.  He  certainly  did  not 
reach  it  himself.  It  is  the  individual's  office  (he  held) 
to  contribute  the  best  he  can  to  the  general  stream  of 
criticism  and  re-criticism.  And  in  this  task  a  critical 
thinker  almost  without  prejudices,  of  very  acute  and 
penetrating  mind,  and  of  unexampled  candour  and 
power  of  profiting  by  the  thoughts  of  others,  is  not  a 
personage  to  be  set  aside  as  of  little  or  no  account. 
"  Who  shall  sum  up  Mill's  collective  influence  as  an 
instructor  in  Politics,  Ethics,  Logic  and  Metaphysics  ?  " 
writes  Mr.  Bain.  "  A  multitude  of  small  impressions 
may  have  the  accumulated  effect  of  a  mighty  whole." 

The  Autobiography  will  ever  remain  as  a  most 
pathetic  human  record,  the  story  of  an  unnatural 
experiment  in  mental  vivisection,  exercised  on  a  little 
child,  issuing  in  a  somewhat  maimed  and  impoverished 
nature,  and  of  an  heroic  and  partly  successful  attempt 
at  recovery.  The  figure  it  presents  to  us  in  mature 
life  is  filled  in  by  the  letters.  It  is  that  of  one 
endowed  by  an  almost  unique  sense  of  public  duty 
and  indifference  to  personal  motives,  making  the  very 
best  of  the  powers  that  had  been  unduly  developed 
and  of  those  which  had  been  unduly  stunted.  Those 
who  knew  him  best  set  hardly  any  limit  to  his  selfless 
devoted ness.  And  their  testimony  is  on  record. 
"  Like  Howard  in  Bentham's  felicitous  eulogy,"  writes 
an  intimate  friend,  "  Mill  might  have  lived  an  apostle 
and  died  a  martyr."  The  saints  are  seldom  univers- 
ally popular,  and  the  "Saint  of  Rationalism  "  will  be 
no  exception.  The  constant  exhibition  of  devotion 
to  duty  is  dull.  And  dulness  is,  to  the  present 
generation  especially,  almost  a  crime.  Indeed,  it  was 
Mill's  own  living  influence  that  helped  to  keep  alive 


JOHN  STUART  MILL  199 

the  high  moral  standard  of  criticism  which  led  to  his 
full  recognition.  Unregenerate  human  nature  will 
reassert  itself  when  such  guides  disappear.  Even 
candour  will  be  assailed  from  time  to  time,  as  it  was  by 
Canning  : 

Hail,  most  solemn  sage, 

Thou  drivelling  virtue  of  this  moral  age. 

But  another  generation  as  strenuous  as  Mill's  own 
will  place  the  moral  virtues  of  his  intellect  very  high 
and  will  reinstate  his  reputation.  His  philosophy 
indeed  is  not  likely  to  revive.  Parts  of  the  Logic 
and  parts  of  the  work  on  Hamilton  will  consequently 
be  read  as  little  as  the  scholastic  speculations  on  the 
intellectus  agens,  and  intellectus  possibilis.  But  even 
in  the  Logic  his  treatment  of  sociology  and  induc- 
tion contain  much  of  permanent  value.  I  think  that 
a  certain  want  of  virility  and  lack  of  imagination  will 
always  be  felt  by  his  readers.  As  we  dwell  on 
him  we  cannot  conjure  up  the  full  picture  of  the  hero 
or  the  great  man  who  is  born,  not  made.  Much  that 
was  born  was  killed  early  by  his  one-sided  training. 
Nearly  all  had  to  be  made.  But  he  was  taught  early 
how  to  make  ;  and  we  see  him  taking  infinite  and 
pathetic  pains  to  recover  artificially  much  that  was 
irretrievably  lost.  One  echoes  his  own  sad  words,  "  I 
never  was  a  boy.  I  never  learnt  to  play  cricket.  It 
is  better  to  let  nature  have  her  own  way." 

Yet  as  one  can  deeply  reverence  a  Christian  saint 
and  owe  much  to  his  influence  though  one  sees  that 
he  is  not  a  boon  companion  or  even  a  gentleman,  so 
it  is  with  such  a  unique  intellectual  and  moral  character 
as  Mill's.  We  admire,  though  the  aesthetic  pleasure 
afforded     by    buoyancy,    richness,    spontaneousness, 


200  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

creativeness  of  mind  is  absent.  The  ascetic  sacrifices 
physical  beauty  and  the  realization  of  the  many-sided 
possibilities  of  life  and  human  nature  in  order  to 
accomplish  the  all-important  tasks  prescribed  by  duty. 
A  certain  narrowness  of  direction  makes  for  effective- 
ness. And  something  akin  to  the  sentiment  of 
admiration  we  give  to  the  persistent  religious  devotee 
will,  I  am  convinced,  be  accorded  by  posterity  to  Mill, 
in  spite  of  all  he  lacked  whether  by  nature  or  in  con- 
sequence of  his  early  training.  When  told  that  he 
was  dying  he  spoke  four  words,  "  My  work  is  done." 


VI 

CARDINAL  VAUGHAN 

It  is  not  too  much  to  say  that  the  publication  of  The 
Life  of  Cardinal  Vaughan  completely  changed  the 
estimate  of  his  character  that  had  been  formed  by  the 
British  public.  To  many,  especially  among  members 
of  the  Anglican  Church,  Cardinal  Vaughan  had  been 
simply  the  type  of  the  masterful  Roman  prelate,  proud, 
ostentatious,  fond  of  flourishing  the  unwelcome  claims 
of  Rome  in  the  faces  of  Englishmen,  treading  ruthlessly 
on  the  toes  of  his  compatriots,  constantly  offending 
their  national  feelings.  Phrases  of  the  Cardinal's  which 
were,  perhaps,  wanting  in  literary  tact  used  to  be 
repeated  from  mouth  to  mouth  and  their  significance 
exaggerated.  His  commanding  and  handsome  pre- 
sence, his  family  relationship  with  aristocratic  English 
Catholic  houses,  the  state  and  circumstance  of  a 
Prince  of  the  Church,  doubled  his  offences.  For  a 
time  there  was  revived  in  his  person  something  of 
what  had  been  the  popular  idea  of  Cardinal  Wiseman 
in  1850.  He  was  the  embodiment  of  "  papal  aggres- 
sion." He  was  the  man  who,  with  immense  publicity 
and  ostentation,  dedicated  England  to  St.  Peter — as 
though  England  were  his  to  dedicate ;  who  laughed 
at  Anglican  orders  as  "shivering  in  their  insular 
isolation "  ;    who   denounced    to   the    Archbishop   of 


202  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

Toledo,  in  a  letter  which  appeared  in  print,  the 
"astute  sect"  of  the  Church  of  England  which  posed 
as  Catholics  ;  who  chose  the  moment  when  his  co- 
religionists were  longing  to  show  their  love  for  the 
great  dead  Queen  of  England  to  remind  the  public 
that  she  was  a  heretic  for  whom  Catholics  could  not 
offer  religious  rites  as  for  a  member  of  the  one  true 
Church. 

If  the  Cardinal's  biography  had  presented  some- 
thing quite  inconsistent  with  the  popular  idea  of 
Herbert  Vaughan,  it  would  not  have  effected  the 
complete  change  in  public  opinion  of  which  I  have 
spoken.  It  would  probably  have  been  regarded  by 
the  Cardinal's  critics  as  a  record  bowdlerized  out 
of  all  truthfulness.  It  is  just  because  the  book  focuses, 
and  puts  in  due  place  and  proportion  the  offending 
features,  because  it  explains  the  popular  impression 
while  correcting  it,  that  it  is  so  interesting  and  so 
effective  a  piece  of  apologetic. 

I  will  not  attempt  at  present  to  summarize  in  a 
few  words  the  corrections  of  popular  misconception 
which  the  book  supplies — to  set  down  categorically 
what  is  true  and  what  false  or  vitiated  by  false 
elements  in  a  conception  of  Cardinal  Vaughan  which 
has  prevailed  somewhat  widely.  It  will  be  more 
convincing  to  endeavour  first  to  place  before  my 
readers  an  outline  of  the  picture  given  us  by  Mr. 
Snead-Cox — a  picture  made  up  almost  entirely  of 
actual  facts  and  of  the  Cardinal's  own  words.  Where 
analysis  involves  very  subtle  distinctions  it  may  not  be 
successful.  But  a  true  picture  cannot  fail  to  correct  a 
false  one. 

The  boyhood  of  Herbert  Vaughan  was  passed 
at  Courtfield — in  the  beautiful  country  traversed  by 


CARDINAL    VAUGHAN  203 

the  river  Wye,  near  Ross.      Here  his  ancestors  had 
been  settled  for  350   years.     His  great-great-grand- 
father  had    a    Spanish    wife.      One   of  the    English 
Catholics   who    had    fought    for    Prince    Charlie    in 
1745,  he  left  the  country  after  Culloden,  joined  the 
Spanish   Army  and   married  a  wife    in   the  country 
of   his   adoption.      The  Cardinal's    mother    did    not 
come  of  a  Catholic  stock.     She  was  a  daughter  of 
Mr.  Rolls  of  the  Hendre,  aunt  to  the  present  Lord 
Llangattock,  and  in  childhood  a  strong  evangelical. 
Becoming  a  Catholic  she  had  all  the  intense  piety  of 
a  devout  convert.      To  their   Spanish    ancestry  and 
their  descent  from  one  with  antecedents  so  different 
from  those  of  the  old    Roman  Catholic   families   of 
England,   may  probably  be  traced  the  very  marked 
and   special   characteristics  of  the  Vaughans  in  the 
generation  to  which    Herbert   Vaughan   belonged — 
their  taste  for  romance  and  adventure,  their  immense 
energy  and  love  of  heroic  and  daring  enterprise.    The 
hereditary   Catholics    of   England    had    for  the  most 
part    the   very    different   qualities   and    habits   of  a 
long-persecuted  race.     Some  had,  after  two  centuries 
of  fidelity  to  the  Holy  See,  conformed  in  the  end  to 
the    Established  Cnurch.      Some  had  grown  lax  in 
their  allegiance  to  Rome,   Cisalpine  in   sentiment  as 
much  as  doctrine.     The  deep  piety  of  others  was  of 
the  long-suffering  sort.     The  thought  of  daring  enter- 
prise and  of  great  conquests    for   the  cause  of   the 
Catholic  Church  was  the  last  which  came  natural  to 
a  race  well-nigh  worn  out  with  legal  disabilities  and 
persecution,    and   barely   allowed    to   remain    in   the 
country.     They  were  content  to   live   in  peace  and 
say  their  prayers  undisturbed — to  live  and  let  live. 
The  love  of   adventure  and  romance  were  from 


204  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

the  first  strong  in  Herbert  Vaughan — though  the 
romance  was  so  markedly  limited  in  its  direction  that, 
as  we  shall  see  later,  he  seemed  to  many  the  most 
unromantic  of  men.  His  romance  centred  in  the  aims 
and  ideals  of  religion,  and  was  inspired  by  an  extra- 
ordinarily vivid  faith.  His  love  of  adventure,  which 
later  on  was  displayed  in  religious  enterprise,  found 
its  first  vent  in  his  keen  love  of  sport.  So  far  as 
human  affections  were  concerned,  romance  was  visible 
mainly  in  his  passionate  love  for  his  beautiful  and 
saintly  mother,  who  died  while  he  was  still  a  boy. 
In  most  other  instances  his  very  absorption  in 
religious  aims  made  him  slight  human  affections  as 
worthless  and  uninteresting.  He  was  little  given  to 
descriptive  writing.  He  lacked  the  gifts  of  a  man 
of  letters.  But  he  has  left  on  record  the  ineffaceable 
picture  his  "  sweetest  mother  "  left  on  him  as  he  used 
to  watch  her  praying  before  the  altar  as  a  little  boy  : 

An  hour  in  the  morning  was  always  spent  in  meditation 
in  the  chapel,  which  was  her  real  home.  She  generally  knelt, 
slightly  leaning  her  wrists  against  the  prie-Dieu.  I  do  not 
recollect  ever  seeing  her  distracted  on  these  occasions,  or 
looking  anywhere  than  towards  the  Blessed  Sacrament  or  on 
her  book.  She  often  remained  with  her  eyes  fixed  on  the 
Tabernacle,  and  while  her  body  was  kneeling  at  the  bottom 
of  the  chapel — her  face  beautiful  and  tranquil  with  the  effects 
of  Divine  Love — her  heart  and  soul  were  within  the  Taber- 
nacle with  her  dearly  beloved  Saviour.  ...  I  used  to  watch 
her  myself  when  in  the  chapel,  and  love  her  and  gaze  upon 
her.  I  used  often  to  watch  her  from  the  gravel  walk  in  the 
flower  garden,  and  marvel  to  see  her  so  absorbed  in  prayer. 

Another  deep  and  ineffaceable  memory  was  his 
love  of  sport  from  boyhood  upwards.  His  old  home 
was  for  him  to  the  end  full  of  memories  of  his  boyish 


CARDINAL    VAUGHAN  205 

adventures  with  gun  and  horse.  Walking  at  Court- 
field  with  a  friend  in  his  later  years  he  pointed  out 
place  after  place  stamped  by  these  keen  early 
memories. 

In  that  pool  in  the  river  he  had  cast  his  first  fly,  but  he 
had  never  cared  for  fishing  ;  there  he  had  been  taught  to  ride  ; 
over  that  fence  he  had  learned  to  jump  ;  under  that  hedgerow 
many  a  time  in  the  summer  he  had  sat  with  his  gun,  waiting 
for  the  rabbits  to  come  out  in  the  dusk,  and  saying  his  rosary- 
while  he  waited ;  in  that  coppice  how  often  he  had  gone 
blackberrying  ;  and  there — but  that  was  later — he  had  killed 
his  first  pheasant ;  and  in  that  field,  on  the  brow  of  Coppet 
Hill,  he  had  almost  shot  his  father — they  were  out  partridge 
shooting,  and  just  drawing  together  under  a  tree  for  luncheon 
when,  putting  his  gun  to  half-cock,  it  somehow  went  off  and 
the  whole  charge  whizzed  past  his  father's  head  ;  the  Colonel 
turned  quickly,  and,  taking  in  the  situation  at  a  glance,  said, 
"  Well,  now  let  us  unpack  the  basket"  So  the  stream  of 
reminiscence  went  on  until,  stopping  short,  and  moving  his 
arm  as  though  to  take  in  all  the  countryside,  and  letting  his 
voice  fall  almost  to  a  whisper,  he  said,  "  And  over  it  all  is  the 
memory  of  what  I  went  through  before  I  made  up  my  mind 
to  be  a  priest." 

It  was,  indeed,  the  realization  that  sport  was 
becoming  the  sole  interest  of  his  life  which  largely 
made  him  turn  his  thoughts  to  the  priesthood.  He 
was  an  eldest  son,  and  the  priesthood  meant  for  him 
the  abandonment  of  fortune  and  position ;  but  he 
often  said  that  it  was  the  sacrifice  of  his  life  as  a 
sportsman  that  cost  him  most. 

At  sixteen  his  resolution  to  be  a  priest  was  taken. 
And  to  him  it  meant  from  the  first  that  he  intended 
to  do,  as  he  expressed  it,  "  something  intense  "  and 
11  something  heroic  "  for  God  and  the  Church.  Hence- 
forth he  applied  himself  to  his  books,  and  retained 


2o6  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

grateful  memories  of  being  taught  habits  of  systematic 
study  at  a  French  School  at  Brugelette,  where  he 
spent  a  year.  His  new  and  absorbing  purpose  made 
it  no  trial  to  him  that  he  lived  in  this  school  a  solitary 
figure  among  uncongenial  French  boys,  who  called 
him  "  Milord  Roast  Beef,"  while  his  cricket  bat — the 
last  relic  of  his  taste  for  English  games — was  con- 
fiscated as  a  suspicious  looking  and  probably  mur- 
derous club.  The  school  helped  him  to  prepare  for 
what  had  become  the  one  object  of  his  life,  and  he 
was  grateful  to  it. 

Passing  to  Rome,  he  gained  there  also  deep  and 
lifelong  impressions — a  quite  special  sentiment  for  all 
its  relics  of  the  past  and  for  the  Holy  See,  as  those 
well  knew  who  were  ever  in  his  company  in  the 
Eternal  City.  He  lived  at  the  Accademia  dei  Ecclesi- 
atici  nobili  and  attended  lectures  at  the  Collegio 
Romano,  hearing,  among  others,  the  celebrated  Father 
Passaglia,  with  whom  he  became  intimate,  and  whom 
he  describes  as  "  kind  and  magnificent."  He  was 
present  at  the  proclamation  of  the  dogma  of  the 
Immaculate  Conception.  His  dream — somewhat  un- 
defined as  yet — was  to  do  a  great  work  as  a  mission- 
ary, perhaps  in  Wales,  perhaps  in  foreign  parts.  He 
read  eagerly  at  this  time  the  lives  of  the  saints, 
especially  of  the  great  missionaries.  Such  reading 
for  him  was  not  that  of  the  day-dreamer  who  is  con- 
tent to  dream  and  do  no  more.  The  healthy  English 
boy  who  used  to  read  Dick  Turpin,  when  it  first 
came  out,  was  often  too  much  inclined  to  try  his 
fortune  as  a  highwayman.  And  Vaughan  had  the 
same  longing  to  translate  into  action  his  day  dreams 
about  the  lives  of  the  saints.  Missionary  work  gave 
him  extraordinary  happiness.     An  expedition    made 


CARDINAL    V AUG  HAN  207 

in  rough  weather,  in  his  youth  at  Courtfield,  to  help 
an  old  man  who  was  taking  to  religion  after  a  life  of 
evil,  stood  out  to  the  end  as  a  bright  spot  in  his  life 
— as  men  of  the  world  will  remember  to  the  last  a 
moment  of  ideal  love  or  of  triumphant  success.  "  The 
night  was  wet  and  cold  and  I  was  riding,"  he  writes 
of  it  in  his  old  age,  "  I  had  to  cross  the  river  and 
wind  along  the  hill  up  home.  The  comfort  and  joy 
of  that  hour  is  inexpressible — it  was  sweeter  than  all 
the  joys  of  the  world — the  joy  within  the  heart 
making  it  feel  confident  in  God  who  watches  over  it." 

While  in  Rome  he  formed  a  close  friendship  with 
Henry  Edward  Manning.  Manning  had  at  that  time 
a  scheme  for  training  the  English  Catholic  clergy  on 
the  model  of  the  oblates  of  the  great  Archbishop  of 
Milan,  Charles  Borromeo.  His  strong  influence  with 
Cardinal  Wiseman  made  the  realization  of  this  idea 
appear  not  improbable.  For  a  moment,  under 
Manning's  influence,  Herbert  Vaughan  turned  aside 
from  his  visions  of  missionary  work  to  join  in  pro- 
moting it.  He  was  appointed  by  Cardinal  Wiseman, 
when  only  twenty-two,  Vice-President  of  St.  Edmund's 
College,  the  successor  in  the  South  of  England  of  the 
old  Douay  College,  and  the  training  ground  for  the 
secular  clergy.  He  became  at  the  same  time  a 
member  of  the  congregation  of  the  Oblates  of  St. 
Charles,  which  Manning  had  brought  into  existence, 
and  induced  some  of  the  divinity  students  at  St. 
Edmund's  also  to  join  this  congregation  and  to  further 
its  special  ends.  The  discipline  of  the  college  was  to 
be  reformed  on  "  Oblate  "  lines. 

The  imperium  in  imperio  thus  created  in  the 
college,  and  the  suspicion  that  Vaughan  was  there  as 
Manning's   secret  agent,    bent  on  gradually  bringing 


203  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

the  whole  college  under  the  rule  of  the  converted 
Archdeacon  of  Chichester,  who  was  far  from  popular 
among  the  old  clergy,  made  Vaughan's  position  an 
impossible  one.  At  twenty-three  he  was  undertaking 
to  instruct  men  of  twice  his  own  age,  who  were  the 
official  superiors  of  the  college.  Many  of  the  divinity 
students  themselves  were  as  old  as  he  was  ;  some  even 
older.  Both  "  divines "  (as  they  were  called)  and 
Professors  resented  his  presence.  He  was,  never- 
theless, a  hero  with  the  boys.  They  were  proud  of 
his  riding  and  his  splendid  presence  ;  and  the  story  of 
a  highwayman  who  stopped  him  one  day  and  found 
that  he  had  met  his  match,  was  long  repeated  in  the 
college.  His  aim  in  accepting  the  Vice- Presidentship 
was,  however,  defeated.  It  may  fairly  be  said  that  he 
was  inconsiderate  and,  in  some  degree,  arrogant  in  his 
bearing  at  St.  Edmund's,  and  quite  failed  to  under- 
stand the  good  elements  in  the  system  he  meant  to 
reform.  But  he  unquestionably  believed  himself  to  be 
aiming  at  a  great  work — at  raising  the  ideals  of  the 
clergy,  at  engrafting  something  of  the  strict  discipline 
and  enthusiastic  piety  of  the  continental  seminaries,  of 
which  St.  Sulpice  was  a  notable  example,  on  a  some- 
what apathetic  English  priesthood.  He  seems,  from 
an  entry  in  his  journal,  to  have  had  some  suspicion, 
on  thinking  matters  over,  that  he  was  (in  his  own 
phrase)  "  proud  and  contentious  "  and  inconsiderate  of 
the  feelings  of  others.  Indeed,  there  was  an  innate 
masterfulness  in  him  through  life  which  was  again  and 
again  rebuked  in  its  manifestations  by  his  touching 
personal  humility.  Whether  in  this  instance  he  was  to 
blame,  or  whether  Cardinal  Wiseman  commissioned 
him  to  carry  out  an  intrinsically  impracticable  scheme, 
the  position  at  St.  Edmund's  proved  (as  I  have  said) 


CARDINAL    V AUG  HAN  209 

impossible.  The  idea  of  bringing  the  clergy  under 
Oblate  domination,  to  be  ruled  by  Dr.  Manning,  an 
Oxford  convert  of  only  four  years'  standing,  was 
eventually  disowned  in  express  terms  by  Cardinal 
Wiseman  himself. 

To  act  merely  as  the  Vice-President  in  an  English 
ecclesiastical  college  which  he  regarded  as  unsatis- 
factory and  deficient  in  high  ideals,  to  carry  on  its 
humdrum  routine,  did  not  at  all  answer  to  Vaughan's 
dreams  of  a  great  "heroic"  enterprise.  Indeed, 
while  he  held  the  position  he  was  a  frequent  absentee, 
more  interested  in  visits  to  Wiseman  at  York  Place 
and  Manning  at  Bayswater,  discussing  with  them  the 
plan  of  campaign,  than  in  the  actual  duties  of  a 
Vice-President.  When,  therefore,  the  original  idea  of 
a  drastic  reformation  of  the  college  under  Oblate 
influences  was  definitely  abandoned,  he  and  the  other 
Oblates  left  the  college,  and  Vaughan  turned  his 
thoughts  once  again  in  the  direction  of  missionary 
work — this  time  more  definitely  of  converting  the 
heathen.  The  dream  grew  in  his  mind  for  months. 
But,  with  his  high  views  of  a  vocation,  he  needed  both 
ecclesiastical  sanction  and  some  sign  that  he  was 
following  not  his  own  whim  and  taste  but  the  will  of 
God.  He  gained  the  warm  approval  of  Cardinal 
Wiseman  in  i860,  and  after  visiting  the  great  shrines 
in  Spain  and  Italy  and  praying  for  guidance,  he  went 
to  his  mother's  grave  at  Courtfield.  Here  (he  writes) 
"after  several  days  of  prayer  an  answer  seemed  to 
come  to  me  in  the  chapel,  saying  distinctly,  '  Begin 
very  humbly  and  very  quietly.'  It  came  to  me,"  he 
adds,  "  like  a  revelation,  with  all  the  force  of  a  new 
idea." 

The   idea   was   deepened   and   quickened   in   the 


2io  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

following  year  by  an  incident  which  recalls  the  con- 
version of  St.  Ignatius  Loyola,  on  his  sick  bed,  and 
his  initiation  of  the  great  enterprise  which  led  to  the 
foundation  of  the  Jesuit  Order.  Herbert  Vaughan 
had  a  severe  illness  in  the  winter  of  1861,  and  during 
his  convalescence  he  fed  his  imagination  with  the 
lives  of  St.  Francis  Xavier,  the  apostle  of  Japan, 
and  St.  Peter  Claver,  "  the  slave  of  slaves."  With 
him,  as  with  St.  Ignatius,  the  effect  of  vivid  meditation 
at  a  time  of  bodily  weakness  was  decisive.  Manning 
— his  Oblate  chief — approved  of  his  wishes,  but 
Vaughan  soon  saw  that  the  Oblate  community  received 
the  idea  with  coldness  and  would  not  really  take  it  up. 
He  had  to  act  for  himself.  And  this  he  did  after  a 
period  of  depression,  and  what  was  to  him  the  greatest 
of  trials — doubt  and  uncertainty  as  to  his  duty.  The 
immediate  plan  he  formed  was  to  make  a  voyage 
across  the  Atlantic,  in  order  to  beg  in  America  for  the 
funds  which  were  needed  to  set  on  foot  a  training 
college  for  missionary  work  among  the  heathen.  And 
this  had  to  be  done  by  his  own  unaided  efforts, 
with  no  help  from  human  companionship  or  disciple- 
ship.  He  spent  six  months  in  Rome  in  1862,  praying 
for  further  guidance.  His  enterprise  was  to  have  all 
the  accompaniments  of  a  great  public  work  for  the 
Church.  He  pleaded  his  cause  before  Montalembert 
and  other  Catholic  leaders  at  the  celebrated  congress 
of  Malines  in  1863,  and  the  assembly  passed  a  reso- 
lution wishing  him  godspeed.  He  went  again  to 
Rome  and  gained  the  special  blessing  of  the  Holy 
Father,  and  letters  of  approval  for  his  American 
campaign.  The  civil  war  was  at  its  height,  and 
therefore  the  United  States  did  not  offer  a  promising 
field.    He  set  sail  in  December  for  California,  receiving 


CARDINAL    VAUGHAN  ii\ 

on  the  eve  of  departure  an  affectionate  letter  from 
Wiseman — to  whose  large-hearted  and  enterprising 
nature  the  adventurous  scheme  especially  appealed. 
Herbert  Vaughan  used  to  say  that  for  thirty  years  he 
could  never  read,  without  tears,  this  letter,  received 
by  him  at  the  moment  of  realizing  his  dreams  of 
heroic  enterprise  for  the  one  great  cause — of  a  life 
really  worth  living. 

Let  one  characteristic  be  here  parenthetically 
noted  which  was  well  known  to  his  intimate  friends 
and  was  apparent  in  every  work  of  his  life,  including 
the  American  expedition  with  its  many  adventures. 
Herbert  Vaughan  hardly  knew  what  fear  was,  and  had 
in  his  attitude  towards  death  the  spirit  of  his  sister, 
the  Poor  Clare  nun,  who  wrote,  when  the  doctor 
pronounced  her  illness  incurable,  to  inform  her  uncle 
of  the  "  glorious  news  "  which  she  was  impatient  to 
tell  him,  that  she  should  soon  be  with  her  Lord  in 
Heaven. 

The  sense  of  romance,  which  his  American  cam- 
paign aroused  in  Herbert  Vaughan's  friends,  was  inevi- 
tably intensified  by  his  extraordinary  personal  beauty 
— far  greater  in  his  thirties  than  at  a  later  period. 
There  still  remain  photographs  which  bear  out  this 
statement.  The  portliness  of  later  life  and  the  slight 
heaviness  of  feature  were  not  yet  in  sight.  Slim  of 
figure,  his  fearless  blue  eyes,  aquiline  nose,  and  firm- 
set  mouth,  the  expression  of  sweetness  and  courage 
combined,  made  him  in  appearance  an  ideal  Sir 
Galahad,  setting  forth  in  quest  of  the  Holy  Grail. 

It  would  be  tedious  to  relate  the  details  of  the 
American  expedition.  But  the  general  story  of  his 
work  there  is  most  instructive  and  characteristic.  It 
was   a   veritable  realization  of  a  chapter  in  some  of 


212  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

those  lives  of  the  Saints  which  had  inspired  him. 
His  absolute  faith  that  the  work  he  had  undertaken 
was  God's  work  made  his  perseverance  indomitable. 
He  counted  on  beginning  to  preach  and  to  beg  in 
the  wealthy  town  of  San  Francisco.  A  crushing  dis- 
appointment, however,  greeted  him  at  the  outset.  The 
Archbishop  of  San  Francisco  needed  all  the  Catholic 
money  of  the  town  for  the  requirements  of  his  diocese. 
He  received  Vaughan  coldly,  and  would  allow  him 
neither  to  preach  nor  to  collect  in  the  city.  This  was 
the  first  reminder  he  received  of  the  hard  world  of 
facts  which  had  to  be  overcome  before  his  dream 
could  be  realized.  The  Presentation  nuns  of  San 
Francisco  were  from  the  first  his  friends.  They 
could  give  him  all  their  sympathy  and  their  prayers. 
But  they  could  give  him  no  money.  Sympathy 
Vaughan  valued.  But  prayer  was,  in  his  opinion,  a 
far  more  practically  useful  asset.  It  was  March — the 
month  consecrated  to  St.  Joseph.  In  simple  Catholic 
fashion  he  bade  them  lay  siege  to  St.  Joseph  and  give 
him  no  peace  until  the  Saint  had  changed  the  Arch- 
bishop's heart.  The  nuns  prayed.  But  the  last  day 
of  March  arrived,  and  there  was  no  result.  "  The 
last  day,  but  not  the  last  hour  of  the  day,"  was  the 
calm  assurance  prompted  by  Vaughan's  confident 
faith  in  prayer.  And  sure  enough,  late  in  the  evening, 
he  received  a  letter  from  the  Archbishop,  giving 
permission  for  one  sermon  in  each  church  in  the  city. 

When  once  he  was  allowed  to  work  and  to  speak 
freely,  the  effect  produced  on  his  hearers  by  the 
heroic  character  of  his  enterprise,  by  his  own  simple 
faith,  by  the  force  of  his  personality,  was  irresistible. 
Money  came  fast.  ^200  was  collected  after  the  first 
sermon  ;  ^250  after  the  second,  and  these  amounts 


CARDINAL    VAUGHAN  213 

were  long  sustained.  April  brought  a  harvest :  then 
things  slackened.  But  May  was  the  month  of  Mary. 
He  prayed  to  the  Virgin  Mother  for  ^1000  to  found 
a  "  bourse "  in  her  honour.  The  money  came,  but 
this  time  it  came  slowly. 

The  last  day  [he  writes]  I  was  minus  700  dollars  and 
knew  not  where  to  turn  for  it — could  not  beg  from  the  poor, 
and  the  Bishop  only  tolerated  begging  from  the  richer 
Catholics  of  the  City.  A  man  met  me  when  I  knew  not  which 
way  to  go  and  gave  me  200  dollars,  saying  he  wished  to 
become  a  special  benefactor.  In  the  evening,  I  was  minus 
400  dollars.  I  went  into  Mr.  Donohoe's  bank  to  sit  down. 
I  told  him  my  case :  he  had  no  sympathy  for  the  work,  and 
had  given  250  dollars  to  please  his  wife.  Said  he  would  lend 
me  400  dollars.  "But  I  can't  lend  them  to  the  Blessed 
Virgin,"  said  I,  smiling.  I  told  him  I  had  not  come  with 
the  intention  of  begging  of  him — he  had  given  generously 
already.  Finally,  I  said,  "  What  interest  do  you  require  ? " 
"  Never  mind  that,"  he  answered.  "  When  do  you  want  the 
principal  back  ? "  "  Never  mind  that,  either,"  said  he.  And 
so  that  night  Our  Lady  had  her  bourse  completed. 

After  five  months  in  California,  Vaughan  went 
to  Peru  and  Chili.  Many  curious  experiences  are 
recorded  by  him,  and  though  his  letters  and  diary 
show  no  great  descriptive  power,  the  keen  sense  of 
adventure  is  apparent  through  them  all.  The  follow- 
ing extract  from  the  Life  contains  a  sample  : 

From  Lima  [we  read]  he  journeyed  into  the  interior,  and 
on  one  occasion  rode  thirty-three  miles  before  breakfast,  start- 
ing at  2.30  a.m.  Writing  to  Mrs.  W.  G.  Ward,  he  says :  "  My 
last  journey  has  been  to  Arequipa.  It  had  the  best  Bishop 
in  Peru,  but  alas !  he  was  buried  just  before  I  reached  there. 
It  is  south  of  Lima,  and  ninety  or  one  hundred  miles  from 
the  coast.  The  ride  across  the  Pampa  Grande,  or  great 
desert  of  Peru,  was  a  great   novelty.     The   road,  or   rather 


214  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

pathway,  is  strewn  with  the  bones  of  horses  and  mules.  And 
after  the  great  plain  of  sand  is  passed  the  track  between 
and  after  the  coast  range  of  the  Andes  is  covered  with  the 
remains  of  animals  that  have  fallen  by  the  way,  exhausted  by 
fatigue  or  thirst.  As  soon  as  an  animal  can  no  longer  go  on, 
after  he  is  relieved  of  his  burden  (everything  that  is  carried 
into  the  interior  has  to  be  borne  by  mules — there  are  no  roads 
for  carts  or  carriages),  he  is  necessarily  left  behind  by  his 
owner,  and  then,  before  the  drove  of  mules  is  out  of  sight, 
great  vultures,  gathering  from  all  parts,  come  down  upon  him. 
One  alights  upon  his  head — the  poor  animal  seems  to  have 
lost  all  sense  of  self-preservation — and  plucks  out  his  eyes. 
The  poor  beast  is  soon  despatched,  and  the  next  day  the 
carcass  is  dried  up  and  abandoned  by  both  man  and  beast. 
Not  always,  however,  by  man,  for  whether  it  be  to  remind 
him  of  death,  or  as  an  ornament  to  the  wilderness,  these 
dried  horses,  mules  and  asses  are  made  to  stand  up,  some 
headless,  some  on  one  or  two  legs,  in  every  shape  and  form 
that  a  dried,  broken-up  carcass  can  be  turned  into." 

In  Chili  he  collected  60,000  dollars,  and  the  days 
of  begging  from  rich  and  poor  alike  are  thus  described 
by  him : 

I  went  up  and  down  the  country,  preaching  in  the 
churches,  begging  alms  of  the  faithful  from  door  to  door. 
One  day,  as  I  was  walking  along  the  street,  a  man  came  up 
to  me  and  said  in  Spanish,  "Are  you  the  person  who  is 
begging  for  the  establishment  of  a  Missionary  College  in 
London  ? "  ■  Yes,  I  am,"  I  replied.  ■  Then,"  said  he,  "  take 
these  hundred  dollars."  "Who  are  you?"  said  I,  "that  I 
may  put  your  name  down  in  my  book."  "  I  am  nobody,"  he 
replied,  and  away  he  went  and  I  saw  him  no  more.  Another 
day  I  was  begging  from  house  to  house,  and  I  entered  the 
house  of  a  washerwoman.  She  gave  me  the  coppers  that 
were  standing  by  her  soapsuds.  The  next  house  I  went  into 
was  that  of  a  rich  man.  I  asked  him  for  alms,  and  he  put 
his  name  down  for  £\ooo. 


CARDINAL    VAUGHAN  215 

On  his  way  home  he  heard  of  the  death  of  his 
dear  friend,  Cardinal  Wiseman.  He  felt  the  loss 
deeply.  He  not  only  loved  Wiseman,  but  he  had 
ever  looked  up  to  the  Cardinal  as  in  many  ways  a 
model  in  his  "large-mindedness  and  generosity,"  in 
his  "  ecclesiastical  government,  his  forgetfulness  of 
injuries,  and  his  exhibition  of  Our  Lord's  doctrine  of 
mercifulness."  But  more  than  all  the  loss  to  the 
cause  of  the  Church  weighed  on  him.  "  Who  is  to 
sit  in  his  vacant  place  ?  "  he  writes  to  a  friend.  "  Who 
is  to  put  on  his  armour?  Who  is  to  continue  the 
work  of  which  he  laid  the  foundations  ?  "  One  man, 
and  one  alone,  seemed  to  Vaughan  capable  of  the 
work,  Henry  Edward  Manning.  Yet  all  probabilities 
were  against  the  appointment.  Vaughan  prayed  and 
prayed  against  hope.  He  went  on  collecting  money, 
and  got  so  much  in  Brazil  that  he  felt  his  enterprise 
to  be  at  last  successfully  accomplished.  At  Rio 
Janeiro  he  received  from  Mr.  W.  G.  Ward  the  news 
that  Manning  was  Archbishop,  and  he  wrote  at  once 
a  letter  full  of  joy  at  the  news. 

A  summons  from  the  new  Archbishop  himself  now 
cut  short  the  American  campaign.  But  Vaughan's 
work  was  really  done.  He  returned  to  England  and 
bought  Holcombe  House,  at  Mill  Hill,  to  serve  as  a 
college  for  his  first  missionaries.  Here  again  came  one 
of  those  ventures  of  prayer  in  which  he  had  learned  to 
trust  from  his  favourite  lives  of  the  saints,  and  one  of 
the  remarkable  instances  of  seeming  answers  to  prayer 
which  accompanied  him  through  life.  The  owner  of 
Holcombe  House  at  first  declined  to  sell.  The  desti- 
nation of  the  house  as  a  Catholic  College  leaked  out, 
and  this  increased  his  indisposition  to  meet  the  wishes 
of  the   would-be    purchaser.     An    elaborate    battery 


2i6  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

of  prayers  to  St.  Joseph  was  initiated.  Vaughan 
surreptitiously  left  a  statue  of  St.  Joseph  in  the  house 
itself,  and  told  his  friends  that  he  was  sure  the  Saint 
would  do  what  was  expected  of  him.  March  19,  the 
feast  of  St.  Joseph,  arrived,  and  that  evening  came 
the  news  that  the  man  had  signed  the  agreement  to 
sell.  These  are  not  stories  characteristic  of  England 
in  the  nineteenth  century.  But  the  facts  are  remem- 
bered by  the  Cardinal's  friends,  and  he  himself  used 
to  narrate  them  in  all  simplicity. 

The  college  was  thus  founded  ;  and  the  atmosphere 
of  the  lives  of  the  saints  was  still  apparent  in  its  con- 
duct, as  it  had  been  in  the  efforts  which  brought  about 
its  foundation.  The  ideal  of  the  austerity  befitting 
future  missioners  among  the  heathen  had  been  kept 
alive  during  his  campaign  in  America,  where  his 
own  life  had  been  one  of  hardship  and  privation  of 
all  kinds :  and  the  same  ideal  was  now  to  be  stamped 
on  the  young  men  as  it  had  been  on  their  leader. 
Experience  led  him  gradually  to  make  concessions  to 
what  was  practicable,  human  nature  being  what  it  is,  in 
men  capable  of  even  heroic  ventures.  At  the  outset, 
however,  he  was  quite  uncompromising  : 

The  first  students  at  Mill  Hill  [his  biographer  tells  us] 
besides  being  taught  to  regard  cooked  food  as  a  luxury  they 
could  haraly  expect,  were  from  time  to  time  subjected  to 
such  impromptu  forms  of  discipline  as  the  enthusiasm  of  their 
Rector  might  suggest.  In  the  early  days  of  the  College, 
Father  Vaughan's  attention  was  drawn  to  the  fact  that  there 
were  some  gold-fish  in  a  pond  near  the  house.  It  occurred  to 
him  that  the  capture  of  these  little  fishes  might  serve  a 
double  purpose — Father  Cyril  Ryder  writes  :  "  There  was  a 
pond  in  the  garden  full  of  gold-fish.  These  he  wanted  to 
sell ;  so  he  got  his  young  men  to  wade  into  the  water  up  to 


CARDINAL    VAUGHAN  217 

their  middle,  in  their  clothes,  and  to  remain  in  this  occupation 
for  some  hours.  He  told  me  it  would  harden  them,  and  pre- 
pare them  for  crossing  rivers  when  they  became  missioners. 
I  am  afraid  I  was  profane  enough  to  think  that  they  would 
in  all  probability  not  survive  their  training,  so  that  the  only 
river  they  might  be  called  upon  to  cross  would  be  the 
Styx." 

It  was  probably  inevitable  that  a  man  of  Herbert  Vaughan's 
impetuosity  of  character  and  abandonment  of  devotion  should 
be  betrayed  into  some  extravagances.  They  did  little  harm, 
for  two  reasons.  With  him  it  was  always  a  case  not  of  "  Go 
on  "  but  of  "  Come  on."  The  youths  who  lived  on  tinned 
meat,  or  stood  for  hours  numbed  to  the  bone,  using  buckets 
to  catch  gold-fish  in  the  garden  pond,  knew  that  the  man 
who  imposed  these  privations  and  penances  had  gone  further 
than  ever  he  was  likely  to  ask  them  to  go.  And  in  him  there 
was  small  fear  of  seeming  inconsistent.  If  experience  showed 
that  a  cook  was  necessary  for  a  college,  or  that  it  was  not 
wise  to  expose  young  men  to  damp  and  cold,  he  could  be 
trusted  at  once  to  end  the  experiment.  He  would  turn  back 
as  readily  as  if,  trying  to  make  a  short  cut  across  country,  he 
was  satisfied  that  the  way  by  the  road  was  quickest.  We 
shall  see  many  instances  in  his  later  life  in  which  he  discon- 
certed friends  by  the  absolute  simplicity  with  which,  without 
casting  about  for  excuses,  he  just  reversed  his  policy.  Once 
convince  him  that  he  was  following  the  wrong  track,  and  the 
order  to  reverse  the  engines  came  just  as  a  matter  of  course. 
And  so  experience  came  as  a  corrective  to  many  a  theory  in 
his  work  of  founding  a  Missionary  College,  and  his  adapta- 
bility and  readiness  to  subordinate  his  own  preconceived  ideas 
were  never  found  wanting.  The  result  is  the  St.  Joseph's 
College,  Mill  Hill,  of  to-day. 

The  American  War  had  brought  to  the  front  the 
question  of  the  slave  population  of  America:  and 
Vaughan  had  himself  witnessed  scenes  which  had 
given  him  a  horror  of  the  attitude  of  the  white  man 
towards  the  negro  in  America.     The  first  missionaries 


2i8  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

from  Mill  Hill  were,  with  the  sanction  of  the  Holy 
See,  to  go  to  Baltimore  with  the  special  object  of 
ministering  to  the  needs  of  the  black  population,  who 
were  largely  without  any  religion  at  all.  Vaughan 
accompanied  them,  and  took  the  opportunity  of  a 
voyage  of  discovery  in  the  American  States,  with  a 
view  to  the  greater  extension  of  the  labours  of  his 
missionaries.  There  is  much  curious  information  in 
Herbert  Vaughan's  diaries  in  which  he  narrates  his 
experiences.  His  first  feeling  was  simply  one  of 
horror  at  the  attitude  of  the  white  men,  even  the 
clergy  and  bishops,  towards  the  negroes,  whom  they 
seemed  to  regard  as  hardly  human.  He  once  told 
the  present  writer  of  a  visit  he  paid  to  a  convent  in 
which  this  feeling  was  only  too  evident.  After 
receiving  the  most  plentiful  hospitality  he  gave  his 
parting  thanks  to  the  Reverend  Mother  for  her  kind- 
ness in  these  words :  "I  shall  pray  that  you  may 
have  as  a  reward  a  very  high  place  in  heaven."  The 
Reverend  Mother  began  to  express  her  gratitude,  but 
he  cut  her  short,  adding :  "  and  that  you  may  have 
a  negro  on  each  side  of  you  for  all  eternity."  Many 
years  afterwards,  when  again  in  America,  he  visited 
the  same  convent,  and  the  Reverend  Mother — then 
an  old  woman — expressed  great  relief  at  seeing  him 
once  more,  as  she  had  something  she  had  for  years 
been  longing  to  ask  of  him.  "  Do  take  that  prayer 
off  me,"  she  explained. 

His  account  in  1871  of  the  state  of  feeling  towards 
the  negroes  is  given  in  the  following  page  of  the 
biography : 

From  the  local  clergy  he  appears  to  have  got  a  somewhat 
mixed  reception,  many  of  them,  who  worked   unceasingly 


CARDINAL    VAUGHAN  219 

among  the  whites,  regarded  the  blacks  as  hopeless,  or  at  any 
rate  outside  their  sphere  of  labour.  From  St.  Louis,  under 
date  January  25,  1872,  he  writes:  "The  Archbishop  thought 
all  my  plans  would  fail ;  could  suggest  nothing  for  the 
negroes,  and  refused  permission  to  collect  and  declined  to 
give  a  letter  of  approval."  A  few  lines  further  down  he 
adds :  "  Father  Callagan,  S.J.,  who  has  for  seven  years 
worked  for  the  negroes,  disagrees  with  the  Archbishop  on 
this  question.  Speaks  of  the  virtue  and  simplicity  of  the 
negro."  In  Memphis  he  notes :  "  Negroes  regarded  even  by 
priests  as  so  many  dogs."  What  perplexed  him  more  than 
anything  else  was  the  inequality  before  the  Blessed  Sacra- 
ment. There,  before  the  altar,  all  men  should  be  equal,  and 
the  colour-line  should  fade  at  the  church  door.  In  New 
Orleans  he  notes  the  case  of  a  wealthy  coloured  man  married 
to  a  white  woman :  "  Pays  for  a  pew  in  the  cathedral — his 
wife  sits  in  it,  but  he  is  obliged  to  go  behind  the  altar."  Per- 
haps the  following  entries,  taken  from  the  commonplace-book 
he  kept  at  the  time,  may  serve  sufficiently  to  convey  his 
impressions  of  the  field  of  labour  on  which  his  missioners 
were  to  enter. 

"  A  common  complaint  that  white  and  black  children  are 
not  allowed  to  make  their  First  Communion  on  the  same  day. 
A  coloured  soldier  refused  Communion  by  a  priest  at  the 
cathedral.  Delassoize's  inclination  to  shoot  the  priest.  In  a 
church  just  built  here,  benches  let  to  coloured  people  which 
are  quite  low  down.  A  lady — coloured — built  nearly  half 
the  church,  another  gave  the  altar ;  both  refused  places 
except  at  the  end  of  the  church.  A  Fancy  Fair — coloured 
people  allowed  to  work  for  it  but  not  admitted  to  it.  It  is 
still  unlawful  in  Alabama  for  coloured  and  whites  to  marry. 
Before  the  war  it  was  unlawful  not  only  to  teach  slaves,  but 
even  for  coloured  freemen  to  receive  any  education.  During 
the  slavery  days  the  priest  had  no  chance.  A  bigoted 
mistress  would  flog  her  slave  if  she  went  to  any  church  but 
her  own,  and  if  she  persisted  in  going  to  the  Catholic  Church, 
would  sell  her  right  away.  I  visited  the  hospital  where  there 
were  a  number  of  negroes.  Talked  to  many  in  it  and  in  the 
street.     All  said  they  had  no  religion.     Never  baptized.     All 


220  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

said  either  they  would  like  to  be  Catholics,  or  something  to 
show  they  were  not  opposed  to  it.  Neither  the  priest  with 
me  nor  the  Sisters  in  the  hospital  do  anything  to  instruct 
them.  They  just  smile  at  them  as  though  they  had  no  souls. 
A  horrible  state  of  feeling !  How  is  it  possible  so  to  treat 
God's  image  ? 

"  In  Georgia  the  State  makes  no  provision  for  the  educa- 
tion of  coloured  people,  and  refuses  them  admission  into  the 
public  schools." 

A  little  experience  made  Vaughan  somewhat 
modify  his  views  as  to  the  desirability  of  treating 
black  and  white  men  exactly  alike.  He  came  across 
cases  where  negroes  had  been  treated  with  an 
approach  to  equality,  in  consequence  of  the  great 
change  wrought  by  the  war,  and  saw  for  himself  that 
their  education  and  habits,  even  their  inborn  character, 
made  them  unfit  for  equal  treatment 

Visited  the  Legislature  (Louisiana)  [we  read  in  his  diary]. 
Half  blacks,  many  unable  to  read — legs  on  desks,  smoking, 
eating  apples,  fourteen  trying  to  speak  at  once.  In  Senate,  a 
coloured  man,  Pinchback,  President. 

He  found  that  so  great  an  authority  as  the  ex- 
President,  Jefferson  Davis,  took  a  very  low  view  of 
the  capabilities  of  the  negro  : 

Called  on  Jefferson  Davis  [he  writes].  He  said  the  negro, 
like  a  vine,  could  not  stand  alone.  No  gratitude,  but  love  of 
persons — no  patriotism,  but  love  of  place  instead.  He  says 
that  men  are  warring  against  God  in  freeing  the  negro,  that 
he  is  made  to  be  dependent  and  servile ;  that  in  Africa, 
wherever  a  community  does  well  an  Arab  is  to  be  found  at 
the  head  of  it.  I  urged  that  this  was  a  reason  in  favour  of 
our  mission,  that  no  one  but  the  Catholic  Church  could 
supply  the  guidance  and  support  the  negro's  need.  Mr. 
Davis  quite  agreed  with  this.     "The  field  is  not  promising," 


CARDINAL    V AUG  HAN  221 

he  said,  "  but  you  have  the  best  chance.    The  Methodists  and 
Baptists  do  much  mischief  among  them." 

Vaughan  came  eventually  to  hold  that  a  certain 
separation  between  black  and  white  men  was  neces- 
sary. However  true  it  was  that  their  souls  were 
equal  before  God,  there  were  both  ineradicable  pre- 
judices and  deep-set  inequalities  of  mental  and  moral 
cultivation  which  made  the  idea  of  an  amalgamation 
of  the  two  races  Utopian.  He  was  in  favour  of  their 
worshipping  in  separate  churches.  Thus,  invidious 
distinctions  in  the  presence  of  the  Blessed  Sacrament 
were  avoided,  while  an  impossible  amalgamation  was 
not  attempted. 

Extremely  interesting  is  Father  Vaughan's  account 
— as  summarized  by  his  biographer — of  the  difference 
between  the  attitude  of  the  inhabitants  of  the  Northern 
and  the  Southern  States,  respectively,  towards  the 
negro. 

Father  Vaughan  was  struck  with  the  fact  that  the  feelings 
with  which  the  North  regarded  the  negro  differed  from  those 
prevalent  in  the  South,  not  in  degree  only,  but  in  kind.  lie 
puts  the  case  thus :  "  In  the  North  the  prejudice  is  against 
the  colour ;  while  in  the  South  it  is  against  the  blood."  He 
instances  a  case  in  which  children,  apparently  of  white  parents, 
have  been  excluded  from  school  because,  in  spite  of  their 
appearance,  they  were  known  to  have  some  taint  of  black 
blood  in  their  veins.  The  distinction  thus  noted  thirty  years 
ago  is  true  in  its  degree  to-day,  and  is  the  outcome  of  dif- 
ferent political  conditions.  Herbert  Vaughan  was  quick  to 
see  that  in  the  North,  where  the  political  or  social  supremacy 
of  the  negro  is  unthinkable,  there  is  little  hesitation  to  throw 
open  all  careers  to  him.  That  liberality,  however,  is  accom- 
panied and  qualified  by  a  very  general  feeling  of  repulsion 
for  the  person  of  the  negro — a  feeling  almost  unknown  in 
the  South.    How  could  it  be  otherwise  ?    The  sort  of  physical 


222  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

shrinking  from  contact  with  the  person  of  a  negro  to  which 
so  many,  whether  in  the  Northern  States  of  the  American 
Union  or  here  in  England,  would  confess,  can  find  no  place 
among  people  who  have  had  negroes  around  them  all  their 
lives — who  from  their  earliest  infancy  have  been  accustomed 
to  negro  nurses  and  negro  servants.  The  Southern  prejudice 
is  not,  and  never  was,  against  the  person  of  the  negro.  On 
the  other  hand,  repugnance  to  the  thought  of  the  supremacy 
of  the  servile  race,  or  even  its  existence  on  a  footing  of 
equality,  amounts  to  a  passion.  In  the  North  a  white  negro 
— there  are  white  negroes  as  there  are  white  blackbirds — 
meets  with  little  prejudice.  The  fact  that  a  man's  lineage 
would  show  that  in  his  blood  he  has  a  "touch  of  the  tar- 
brush," would  affect  him  as  much  and  as  little  in  Boston  or 
New  York  as  in  London  or  in  Birmingham.  The  visible 
marks  of  race  disability  are  absent,  and  it  is  they  that  matter. 
In  the  South  the  mere  question  of  colour  counted  for  little. 
What  mattered  was  the  blood. 

Before  leaving  America,  Father  Vaughan  visited 
St.  Louis,  New  Orleans,  Charleston  and  other  places 
and  then  returned  to  New  York,  in  each  place  begging 
for  money.  In  New  York  alone  he  raised  ^800.  On 
his  return  from  America,  some  of  his  friends  observed 
not  only  his  enthusiasm  for  much  in  the  American 
character — as  found  in  the  Northern  States  especially 
— but  even  a  slight  occasional  approach  to  the 
American  accent  in  his  speech,  which  always  remained 
with  him.  "  The  American,"  he  wrote,  "  is  prodigal 
of  money,  health,  home,  lands  and  all.  He  will 
sacrifice  all  this  for  the  sake  of  an  undertaking."  It 
was  this  American  tenacity  of  purpose,  this  determina- 
tion to  succeed,  no  matter  what  the  sacrifice  to  self, 
this  combination  of  intense  devotion  with  practicality, 
which  so  strongly  appealed  to  him,  and  which  he  felt 
to  be  so  invaluable  when  applied  to  the  achievement 


CARDINAL    VAUGHAN  323 

of  the  great  ideal  objects  of  religion.  It  used  to  be 
said  that  there  was  something  American  in  his  way 
of  looking  at  things  for  the  rest  of  his  life — something 
very  practical,  and  for  this  very  reason  in  small  ways 
unromantic  (for  romance  is  apt  to  be  unpractical), 
accompanying  the  intensely  romantic  love  of  adventure 
and  devotion  to  the  cause  of  the  Church. 

The  college  was  founded  and  was  an  emphatic 
success.  He  loved  it  and  visited  it  again  and  again 
after  his  direct  connexion  with  it  was  severed. 

He  saw  the  seed-time  and  he  saw  the  harvest  [writes  Mr. 
Snead-Cox],  and  he  knew  that  when  he  was  gone  others 
would  continue  to  reap  where  he  had  sown.  The  college  he 
built  is  there,  and  doing  to-day  the  work  he  planned.  His 
missioners,  under  their  sentence  for  life,  are  at  work  to-day 
in  the  Philippines,  in  Uganda,  in  Madras,  in  New  Zealand,  in 
Borneo,  in  Labuan,  in  the  basin  of  the  Congo,  in  Kashmir 
and  in  Kafristan.  In  1908  they  gave  baptism  to  nearly 
10,000  pagans.  In  his  busiest  days,  as  Bishop  in  Salford,  or 
Cardinal  m  Westminster,  Herbert  Vaughan  was  always  glad 
when  he  could  snatch  a  brief  time  for  silence  and  retreat  at 
Mill  Hill.  He  went  to  the  college  when  his  time  came  to 
die,  and  he  chose  it  for  his  place  of  burial. 

I  have  dwelt  thus  long  on  the  foundation  of  the 
College  of  Foreign  Missions  because  I  think  no 
episode  in  his  life  was  more  characteristic  of  his 
greater  qualities.  The  self-abandonment,  the  deter- 
mination to  persist  through  all  discouragement,  the  life 
of  adventure,  through  many  phases  and  circumstances, 
the  resolution  to  accomplish  what  seemed  impossible 
and  its  realization,  the  life  of  absolute  confidence 
in  prayer,  combined  with  an  intensely  practical 
energy — and,  above  all,  the  doing  what  he  did  quite 
single-handed,    with   none    of    the    help    which    the 


224  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

sympathy  of  disciples  affords — all  these  characteristics 
found  their  full  play  and  manifestation  in  the  estab- 
lishment of  Mill  Hill  College. 

The  story  does  not,  however,  call  attention  to  the  side 
of  his  nature  in  which  he  was  less  perfectly  equipped. 
His  campaign  of  preaching  and  begging  gave  ample 
opportunity  for  the  display  of  his  energy,  his  invincible 
tenacity  of  purpose,  his  power  of  sustained  and  arduous 
work  for  the  great  objects  of  religion  without  any  help 
from  human  sympathy.  It  gave  opportunity  for  the 
exercise  of  the  personal  influence  he  had  in  virtue  of 
his  high  character  and. of  a  certain  charm  which  made 
him  as  irresistible  for  those  who  felt  it  as  he  was  un- 
sympathetic to  some  who  did  not.  He  showed  also 
in  the  actual  working  of  the  College  a  very  considerable 
power  of  learning  by  experience,  modifying  extreme 
measures  when  he  found  them  to  be  unworkable. 

Where,  indeed,  he  could  choose  the  work  to  be 
done,  and  himself  had  the  management  of  it,  he  had 
an  extraordinary  faculty  for  carrying  a  scheme  through, 
for  he  knew  his  own  limitations  as  well  as  his  powers. 
But  life  presents  comparatively  few  opportunities  where 
this  is  possible.  Men  have  to  take  their  share  in  the 
movements  of  the  time,  originated  by  others,  and 
representing  the  aims  and  ideals  of  others.  They 
have  to  deal  with  circumstances  created  by  very  many 
diverse  characters  and  natures.  And  their  actions 
affect  not  only  the  few  who  are  their  instruments  and 
whom  they  can  guide,  but  many  on  whose  lives  they 
impinge  incidentally.  An  immense  and  complicated 
machinery  is  already  at  work  in  human  society.  And 
where  machinery  is  complex  a  slight  action  may 
have  a  very  disturbing  effect,  while  the  greatest  force 
and  persistence  may  have  no  effect  at  all  if  directed 


CARDINAL    VAUGHAN  225 

wrongly.  A  very  slight  movement  of  a  child's  finger 
will  make  it  necessary  to  send  a  watch  to  the  watch- 
maker before  it  will  go.  The  utmost  human  force 
that  attempts  to  check  the  wheel  of  a  steam  engine 
by  pressing  against  it  has  no  appreciable  effect  on  it 
at  all.  Accurate  scientific  knowledge  is  needed  to 
deal  with  a  machine  safely  and  successfully.  The 
driver  can  stop  the  engine  or  set  it  going  with  the 
smallest  exertion  rightly  applied.  Here,  then,  is  a 
call  for  qualities  other  than  those  in  which  Vaughan 
was  pre-eminent.  And  the  critic  who  attempts  to 
describe  this  remarkable  man  from  the  materials  pre- 
sented in  his  biography  must  give  some  indication  of 
the  powers  he  had  not  as  well  as  of  those  he  had. 

In  honesty  as  in  tenacity  of  purpose  Cardinal 
Vaughan  was,  as  I  have  said,  almost  unrivalled.  His 
single-minded  devotion  to  duty  and  desire  to  learn 
and  correct  his  own  mistakes  were  as  remarkable  as 
his  zeal  and  energy,  raising  these  qualities  on  to  a  far 
higher  plane  than  that  of  obstinate  stubbornness. 
Here  was  an  immense  initial  driving  force  and  a 
potent  principle  of  sustained  action.  But  in  dealing 
with  the  movements  of  the  day,  in  tracing  their 
sources  and  forecasting  the  probable  issue  of  what 
he  did,  our  estimate  of  his  powers  must  be  more 
moderate.  When  it  was  a  case  of  carrying  out  a 
policy  already  determined  by  his  party — as  in  the 
question  of  primary  education  for  Catholics — he  was 
very  successful.  Catholic  education  was  by  the  whole 
Catholic  community  acknowledged  to  be  a  necessity. 
The  perplexing  questions  which  may  be  raised  in 
connexion  with  partial  concessions  to  the  principle 
of  mixed  education  in  order  to  suit  modern  exigencies 
were  beforehand  ruled  out  of  Court.     The  important 

Q 


226  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

thing  was  to  estimate  the  practical  consequences  of 
proposed  measures  in  their  bearing  on  the  fixed 
Catholic  programme  and  the  interests  of  Catholics, 
and  to  press  insistently  for  what  was  essential.  Here 
Vaughan's  honest  and  straightforward  mind,  his 
absence  of  all  arriere  pensie  to  other  interests  and 
his  good  practical  sense  as  well  as  his  resolute 
persistence  were  invaluable.  Again,  when  it  was  a 
necessity  for  the  Bishops  to  protect  themselves  from 
encroachments  on  diocesan  interests  from  the  Jesuits 
and  other  religious  orders,  he  was  an  admirable  as 
well  as  an  untiring  advocate.  Few  chapters  in  his 
Life  are  more  characteristic  than  the  twelfth,  which 
describes  his  long-drawn-out  duel  with  Father  Gallwey. 
When  the  line  of  action  was  fairly  simple  and  was 
marked  out  for  him  he  followed  it  with  a  success  often 
almost  equal  to  that  which  attended  him  in  his  own 
chosen  schemes.  It  was  where  he  had  himself  to 
review  a  difficult  situation  in  which  he  might  find 
himself,  and  determine  on  his  own  line  of  action,  that 
his  success  could  not  always  be  relied  on. 

In  his  dealings,  indeed,  as  a  Bishop  at  Manchester, 
with  business  men,  whose  views  and  wishes  were 
plainly  avowed  by  themselves  and  understood  by 
him,  he  was  quite  at  home.  Judgment  had  not  in 
such  cases  to  be  very  subtle.  Straightforward  and 
reliable  action  and  a  thorough  knowledge  of  his  own 
mind  were  great  assets  in  his  favour.  But  in  a  more 
complex  society,  or  in  fields  to  which  he  was  more  or 
less  a  stranger,  he  was  less  successful.  The  very 
clearness  of  his  logic,  the  very  habit  of  resting  on  a 
few  simple  ideal  principles,  which  made  him  so 
successful  when  he  could  choose  his  conditions  or 
thoroughly   grasped   the   relevant    circumstances,   or 


CARDINAL    VAUGHAN  227 

when  he  held  a  brief  for  others,  were  sometimes 
obstacles  in  a  more  complex  situation.  When 
people's  aims  were  mixed  and  their  motives  either 
unacknowledged  or  outside  his  own  definite  but 
restricted  purview,  he  might  totally  misconceive  the 
position  of  affairs,  and  consequences  followed  which 
he  did  not  foresee  or  desire.  The  quick  sympathy, 
the  perception  of  the  effect  of  word  or  action  on 
others,  must  in  such  an  atmosphere  run  faster  than 
logic  if  mistake  is  to  be  avoided.  Such  perceptions 
exist  in  some  men  as  a  kind  of  instinct,  and  are 
perfected  by  experience  of  the  world.  Without 
them  many  danger  signals  are  invisible.  Logic 
advances  the  more  fearlessly  and  impetuously  from 
the  clearness  with  which  it  sees  its  goal,  while  the 
obstacles  are  invisible  to  it.  If  only  a  few  have  the 
perceptions  of  which  I  speak  sufficiently  for  con- 
spicuous success,  most  men  of  wide  experience  acquire 
them  so  far  as  to  protect  them  from  obvious  mistakes. 
Herbert  Vaughan  was  not  endowed  by  nature  with 
these  perceptions,  and  his  experience  of  the  world 
had  been  somewhat  limited. 

The  almost  intuitive  appreciation  of  public  opinion 
of  which  I  speak  tells  a  man  where  it  must  be  yielded 
to  if  we  are  to  guide  it,  how  on  Baconian  principles 
it  is  to  be  conquered  by  obedience.  Tenacity  of 
purpose  without  it  may  be  a  positive  evil,  for  mistakes 
are  persisted  in.  In  extreme  instances  (among  which 
we  certainly  cannot  place  the  late  Cardinal)  we  are 
apt  to  recall  Bossuet's  words  to  Abb£  de  Rance\ 
"A  good  intention  with  little  enlightenment  is  a 
serious  evil  in  high  places."  In  Vaughan's  own  case 
we  need  not  go  beyond  his  own  judgment  of  himself. 
With  a  noble  honesty  which  is  rare  indeed,  and  which 


228  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

almost  disarms  criticism,  he  wrote  himself  to  the 
Pontiff  before  his  appointment  to  the  See  of  West- 
minster pointing  out  certain  deficiencies  in  his  equip- 
ment for  dealing  with  the  great  world.  "  A  person," 
he  wrote,  "  may  succeed  in  the  subordinate  position 
of  a  Bishop  in  a  provincial  city  such  as  Manchester, 
and  yet  he  may  be  unfit  to  be  Metropolitan  and  fill 
the  See  of  Westminster.  The  duties  are  of  a  very 
different  order  and  require  very  different  qualifications. 
I  do  not  possess  those  high  qualities.  ...  It  will  be 
very  easy  in  such  a  position  as  the  See  of  Westminster 
to  compromise  the  interests  of  religion  by  errors  of 
judgment — and  the  very  quality  of  a  certain  tenacity 
and  determination  would  make  those  errors  still  more 
serious." 

I  am  far  from  denying  that,  even  in  the  larger  and 
more  complex  world  with  which  he  was  in  contact  as 
Archbishop,  his  single  directness  did  at  times  have  a 
great  and  salutary  effect — the  more  salutary  from  its 
contrast  with  the  ways  of  the  world  on  which  he  had 
to  act.  Straightforwardness  rebuked  crookedness, 
singleness  of  aim  and  unselfishness  rebuked  worldli- 
ness  and  self-seeking,  and  made  them  ashamed.  But 
if  we  are  trying  to  paint  the  man  as  he  was,  to 
depict  light  and  shadow,  it  is  to  a  certain  want  of 
perception  of  the  forces  at  work  in  a  large  and  com- 
plex society  that  the  less  successful  side  of  his  career 
is  to  be  ascribed.  The  absurd  misconception  of  him 
as  an  arrogant  prelate,  swaggering,  loving  display, 
bent  on  enforcing  Roman  dominion,  finds  the  explana- 
tion which  is  its  best  refutation  in  a  certain  want  of 
perception  in  him  as  to  the  effect  of  what  he  did  on  a 
public  which  he  did  not  wholly  understand.  If  a 
certain  external  pomp  realized  in  his  mind  what  was 


CARDINAL    VAUGHAN  229 

seemly  for  a  Cardinal  of  the  Holy  Roman  Church,  he 
acted  on  his  view.  Such  state  was  familiar  to  one 
who  had  spent  so  much  of  his  early  life  in  Rome. 
He  did  not  realize  the  effect  of  a  new  departure  in 
this  respect  on  a  community  only  just  emerging  from 
the  ideas  of  Roman  aggression,  which  had  led  even  to 
bloodshed  as  recently  as  1850.  If  his  devotion  to  St. 
Peter  prompted  a  public  dedication  of  our  country  to 
the  Prince  of  the  Apostles,  it  never  occurred  to  him  to 
be  anxious  beforehand  as  to  the  effect  of  his  act  on 
the  nation  in  whose  presence  his  act  of  devotion  was 
publicly  advertised.  If  the  case  against  Anglican 
orders  seemed  to  him  overwhelming,  he  spoke  of 
them,  with  the  contempt  his  downright  logic  warranted, 
as  "  shivering  in  their  insular  isolation."  When  Lord 
Halifax,  as  President  of  the  English  Church  Union, 
wrote  a  letter  to  the  Spanish  Primate,  in  which  his 
claim  to  be  a  Catholic  might  lead  a  foreigner  to 
believe  that  he  was  in  communion  with  Rome, 
Vaughan's  comment  was  blunt  in  the  extreme.  The 
Cardinal  did  not  hesitate  to  warn  the  Archbishop 
against  the  M  subtle  astuteness  "  of  this  w  sect,"  which 
might  "  easily  deceive  him."  Such  phrases  came 
from  no  wish  to  offend  the  Anglicans.  He  desired, 
on  the  contrary,  to  be  sympathetic  to  them.  But  he 
did  not  realize  their  attitude  of  mind  sufficiently  to 
forecast  how  his  words  would  wound  them.  It 
appeared  to  some  even  among  his  friends  that  he 
touched  the  raw  when  it  was  not  necessary  or  useful. 
But  he  did  not  know  it.  He  did  not  realize  that 
he  was  causing  keen  irritation  and  damaging  his  own 
persuasiveness.  Or  he  thought  that  irritation  arose 
inevitably  from  the  nature  of  the  truth  rather  than 
from  his  peculiar  way  of  putting  it. 


23°  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

Guided  by  his  own  logic,  based  on  the  recognized 
teaching  of  the  Catholic  Church,  he  could  realize  in 
imagination  hardly  any  other  standpoint.  He  did, 
indeed,  I  think,  realize  the  standpoint  of  the  man  of 
business  to  whom  religion  is  nothing.  But  his  genius 
being  practical  rather  than  intellectual,  he  fully 
grasped  no  standpoint  but  his  own  among  genuinely 
religious  men.  The  inquiring  Agnostic,  the  Anglican, 
the  liberal  Catholic,  the  intellectual  Catholic,  were 
very  partially  understood  by  him,  yet  they  were 
among  the  classes  he  had  to  deal  with.  He  had, 
moreover,  no  sufficient  protective  realization  of  the 
probable  effect  of  many  arguments,  convincing  to 
himself,  on  the  mixed  multitude  which  reads  the  news- 
papers. Of  this  last  gift  he  had,  I  think,  enough  for 
the  blunt  and  practical  Manchester  public  but  not 
enough  for  a  more  sensitive  audience  or  for  a  larger 
world  with  more  various  denizens.  If  others  took 
real  pains  to  understand  his  point  of  view,  they  would, 
in  nine  cases  out  of  ten,  find  it  clear  and  cogent, 
whether  they  agreed  with  it  or  not.  But  he  could  not 
himself  move  in  a  mixed  crowd  without  jostling 
it  sometimes  too  roughly  to  put  it  in  the  best 
temper  for  understanding  him.  And  in  religious  con- 
troversy he  had  also  at  times  too  bad  an  opinion  of 
his  opponents'  case  even  to  try  and  persuade  them. 
He  tried,  as  it  has  been  expressed,  to  "  convict  rather 
than  to  convince"  them.  In  his  funeral  sermon  on  my 
father  he  spoke  of  him  as  "  the  champion  of  unpopular 
truth,"  and  this,  I  think,  was  his  ideal  of  his  own  duty. 
He  was  apt  to  ascribe  his  unpopularity  in  certain 
quarters  to  the  inevitable  unpopularity  of  high  and 
unworldly  maxims  and  truths  with  those  who  are  with- 
out them  and  therefore  resent  them.     And  though  there 


CARDINAL    VAUGHAN  231 

are  not  a  few  such  cases,  he  included  among  them, 
perhaps,  criticisms  on  his  views  which  deserved  atten- 
tion. Finer  shades  of  opinion  were  generally  invisible 
to  him.  And,  consequently,  while  his  intentions  were 
absolutely  just,  there  were  those  who  felt  that  in  fact 
he  treated  them  with  injustice. 

The  lessons  of  experience  made  the  defect  of 
which  I  speak  in  reality  far  less  noteworthy  in  later  life 
than  in  earlier  days ;  but  the  great  position  he  held  as 
a  Cardinal  led  latterly  to  its  being  in  fact  more  noticed, 
while  the  years  at  Manchester  presented  compara- 
tively few  occasions  when  it  was  specially  apparent  or 
important.  In  such  anxious  controversies  during  his 
reign  at  Westminster  as  were  raised  by  the  Anglican 
movement  and  by  the  liberal  Catholic  utterances  of 
Dr.  Mivart  and  others,  his  grasp  of  principle  was 
brought  into  play,  but  men  felt  at  the  same  time  a 
certain  want  of  familiarity  on  his  part  with  the  forces 
at  work.  I  shall  not  illustrate  the  above  remarks 
primarily  from  such  episodes,  on  which  opinions  are 
likely  to  differ  widely  as  to  the  relative  degree  in 
which  his  strength  and  his  weakness  were  respectively 
apparent.  As  my  chief  object  is  to  obtain  a  psycho- 
logical picture  which  will  be  generally  recognized  as 
accurate,  I  prefer  to  take  as  an  illustration  his  conduct 
of  the  Tablet  during  the  Vatican  Council.  His  bio- 
grapher gives  a  very  frank  account  of  this  chapter  of 
the  Cardinal's  life,  and  admits  that  a  very  large  number 
of  influential  Catholics  felt,  at  the  time,  that  his  action 
was  unfortunate. 

The  critics  of  the  proposed  Definition  of  Papal 
Infallibility  were  intellectual  and  learned  Catholics, 
like  Bishop  Hefele,  Bishop  Moriarty,  Bishop  Dupan- 
loup  and  Dr.  Newman,  and  liberal  Catholics  as   Sir 


2}2  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

John  Acton  and  Professor  Friedrich — two  classes  of 
his  co-religionists  into  whose  views  Father  Vaughan 
failed  to  enter  with  any  understanding.  He  depicted 
these  views  in  his  own  way,  held  up  his  hands  in 
amazement  at  their  perversity,  and  raised  the  standard 
of  Catholic  loyalty.  Least  of  all  could  he  understand 
Dupanloup  and  the  moderate  inopportunists. 

He  could  not  [writes  his  biographer]  understand  the  atti- 
tude of  men  who,  themselves  accepting  the  Infallibility  of  the 
Pope,  worked  so  hard  to  prevent  the  definition  of  the  truth 
they  believed  in.  All  Catholics,  to  whatever  theological 
school  they  belonged,  whether  styling  themselves  Liberals  or 
Ultramontanes,  held  as  an  article  of  Faith  that  a  General 
Council  is  under  the  direct  guidance  of  the  Holy  Ghost,  and 
that  its  decrees  are  necessarily  and  infallibly  true.  To  be 
nervously  apprehensive  as  to  the  consequences  of  decisions 
so  arrived  at,  or  to  show  a  disposition  beforehand  to  question 
the  expediency  of  a  decision  so  sanctioned  and  so  certainly 
true,  seemed  to  Herbert  Vaughan  illogical  and  almost  un- 
catholic. 

It  was  (Father  Vaughan  held)  the  duty  of  a 
Catholic  editor  simply  to  oppose  these  wrong-headed 
persons  in  the  most  effective  manner  possible.  And 
he  proceeded  to  do  so. 

It  was  a  singular  policy  and  a  very  simple  one  [we  read 
in  his  Life].  Side  by  side  with  the  vehement  advocacy 
of  Papal  Infallibility  as  a  doctrine  recommended  at  once  by 
reason  and  authority,  and  the  almost  universal  belief  of 
Catholic  Christendom,  was  a  resolute  exclusion  of  any  and 
every  expression  of  the  opposite  view.  As  far  as  the  Tablet 
was  concerned,  Herbert  Vaughan  deliberately  set  himself  to 
strangle  and  suppress  any  and  every  utterance  in  favour  of 
the  Inopportunist  Party.  A  search  through  the  correspond- 
ence columns  of  the  Tablet  fails  to  show  a  single  letter  on 
the  side  of  which,  in  this  country,  Cardinal    Newman  and 


CARDINAL    VAUGHAN  233 

the  Bishop  of  Clifton  (Dr.  Clifford)  were   the   conspicuous 
exponents. 

Father  Vaughan's  policy  was  most  unpopular. 
Many  Catholics  would  no  longer  admit  the  Tablet  into 
their  houses.  But  Vaughan  never  flinched.  It  was 
a  matter  of  pressing  duty  according  to  the  simple  view 
which  he  took  of  the  case. 

His  conduct  at  this  time  [continues  Mr.  Snead-Cox]  was 
governed  by  a  great  fear.  .  .  .  He  not  only  believed  in  the 
Infallibility  of  the  Pope,  but  was  sure,  and  rightly  sure,  that 
it  would  shortly  become  an  Article  of  Faith,  binding  on  the 
conscience  of  every  Catholic.  There  came  in  the  fear — 
might  not  the  Definition  bring  with  it  a  new  peril  for  souls  ? 
And  what  an  awful  responsibility  would  be  his  who,  through 
the  columns  of  a  newspaper,  allowed  the  seeds  of  doubt  to 
be  scattered  abroad — doubts  which  might  ripen  into  such 
strength  that  not  even  the  fiat  of  a  General  Council  could 
still  them  ?  What  was  the  gagging  of  a  newspaper  by  the 
side  of  the  loss  of  a  single  soul  ?  The  whole  point  of  view  is 
alien  enough  to  the  ordinary  British  reader,  but,  given  the 
point  of  view,  who  shall  quarrel  with  the  conclusion  ?  It  was 
humanly  certain  that  the  Definition  would  come — and  Herbert 
Vaughan  was  in  a  position  to  judge  rightly  as  to  that ;  it  was 
supremely  important  that  when  it  came  it  should  be  accepted 
ex  animo  and  as  of  faith  by  every  Catholic.  The  sands  in 
the  hour-glass  were  running  low,  but  until  the  Council  had 
actually  proclaimed  the  Dogma  there  was  still  room  and 
liberty  for  discussion.  But  how  if  some  argument  against 
the  Dogma  stuck,  how  if  it  carried  conviction — might  not  the 
duty  of  submission  then  be  made  overwhelmingly  difficult  ? 

This  was  a  simple  logical  view  of  the  case  as  it 
presented  itself  to  one  single  class  of  mind  among  the 
scores  existing  in  the  Catholic  Church.  Vaughan 
seems  to  have  contemplated  solely  the  struggles  of  a 
simple  mind — of  one  not  already  acquainted  with  any 


234  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

of  the  well-known  controversies  in  historical  and 
theological  science,  who  would  make  his  acts  of  faith 
happily  if  he  read  in  the  Tablet  only  reasons  in 
favour  of  the  Definition,  but  might  be  troubled  and 
clouded  and  tempted  if  he  read  arguments  on  the 
other  side.  For  such  a  mind  he  was,  perhaps,  right. 
A  man  of  this  kind,  if  he  was  able  to  read  at  all,  had 
better  not  read  discussions  far  beyond  his  compre- 
hension in  connexion  with  a  doctrine  which  would 
probably  be  defined. 

But  such  a  simple  struggle  between  faith  and 
doubt  did  not  represent  the  issues  before  the  Catholic 
world  at  large — a  world  which  included  many  educated 
men  and  many  learned  men.  In  that  larger  world  a 
greater  variety  of  human  emotion  and  of  thought  was 
at  work.  Mrs.  Augustus  Craven  used  to  ascribe  her 
own  opposition  to  the  definition  to  the  "odious  and 
unchristian  manner  in  which  it  was  defended  by " 
some  amongst  its  chief  advocates.1  This  was  itself 
violent  language,  but  it  represented  the  impression 
of  a  good  and  able  woman.  The  most  prominent 
agitators  for  the  Definition  were  the  promoters  of 
opinions  which  Dupanloup  and  Newman  regarded  as 
intolerant  and  at  variance  with  Catholic  theology. 
"  Writers  of  a  school  which  I  thought  excessive," 
exclaimed  Pere  Gratry,  when  submitting  to  the  actual 
definition,  "  were  undesirous  of  limitation  to  infallibility 
ex  cathedra  as  being  too  narrow."  M.  Louis  Veuillot, 
in  the  Univers,  was  printing  hymns  to  the  Holy  Ghost 
with  "  Pius  "  substituted  for  "  Deus."  He  published 
a  pamphlet  called  L? illusion  liberate,  in  which  he  wrote 
as  follows :  "  We  all  know  certainly  only  one  thing, 
that  is,  that  no  one  knows  anything  except  the  man 
1  Sec  W.  G.  Ward  and  the  Catholic  Revival,  p.  259. 


CARDINAL    VAUGHAN  235 

with  whom  God  is  for  ever,  the  man  who  carries  the 
thought  of  God.  We  must  unswervingly  follow  his 
inspired  directions."  Another  writer  committed  him- 
self to  the  statement,  "  When  the  Pope  thinks  it  is 
God  who  meditates  in  him."  In  flagrant  disregard  of 
the  sacred  and  immemorial  tradition  of  the  Church 
that  discussion  in  Council  was  the  normal  means 
whereby  definitions  of  dogma  had  been  in  the  past 
accurately  framed,  the  Univers  laughed  at  the  Corre- 
spondant  for  urging  the  importance  of  such  discussion. 
"  The  Correspondent  wants  them  to  discuss  and  wishes 
the  Holy  Ghost  to  take  time  in  giving  an  opinion." 
Such  was  the  sneer  of  the  Univers.  "  It  has  a 
hundred  arguments  to  prove  how  much  time  for 
reflection  is  indispensable  to  the  Holy  Ghost."  x  If 
there  seemed  to  be,  humanly  speaking,  a  danger  lest 
a  definition  of  Papal  Infallibility  might  represent  such 
views  as  these,  or  even  be  so  framed  as  to  give  them 
any  countenance,  a  large  body  of  the  Bishops  not 
unnaturally  judged  the  time  inopportune  for  a  defini- 
tion, and  considered  their  own  opposition  to  it  to  be 
the  normal  Providential  means  for  averting  it  They 
declined  to  admit  the  assumption  that  the  Holy  Ghost 
was  on  the  side  of  untheological  extremes.  Again, 
the  spokesmen  of  this  extreme  "  new  Ultramontane  " 
school  were  not  among  the  rulers  of  the  Church. 
They  were,  in  many  cases,  laymen,  whose  extrava- 
gances had  long  been  denounced  by  wise  members 
of  the  episcopate.  Archbishop  Sibour  of  Paris,  an 
Ultramontane  of  the  school  of  Fenelon,  had,  some 
years  earlier,  spoken  as  strongly  against  these 
advocates  of  Papal  absolutism  as  had  Dupanloup,  who 

1  The  writings  of  this  time  are  analyzed  at  some  length  in  Chapter  X. 
of  the  present  writer's  work,  W.  G.  Ward  and  the  Catholic  Revival. 


236  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

was  suspected  of  Gallican  leanings.  The  zeal  and 
piety  of  M.  Veuillot  were  beyond  question,  and 
exaggerated  language  might,  in  the  writer  himself,  be 
a  symptom  of  its  praiseworthy  intensity.  To  take  it 
literally  as  expressing  Catholic  doctrine  and  commit 
others  to  it  was  quite  another  matter,  as  though  the 
lover,  who  may  be  readily  forgiven  his  hyperbolical 
metaphor  when  he  addresses  his  beloved  as  "  My 
angel,"  should  thereupon  endeavour  to  make  others  act 
on  the  assumption  that  she  has  wings.  In  England 
itself  this  extreme  language  shocked  the  old  clergy.  It 
was  contrary  to  the  theology  that  had  been  taught — a 
theology  which  clearly  separated  the  divine  "  assist- 
ance "  which  averted  error  in  the  final  definition  from 
positive  inspiration — and  recognized  definitely  the 
human  element  which  might  make  the  very  arguments 
adduced  in  the  preamble  to  a  definition  fallacious. 
Vaughan's  straightforward  and  practical  mind,  on  the 
other  hand,  saw  in  the  inopportunist's  position  only 
the  paradox,  "  Here  is  a  doctrine  I  admit  to  be  true. 
The  Holy  Ghost  presides  at  a  Council.  Nevertheless 
I  beg  him  not  to  define  it,  though  He  may  judge 
it  opportune,  as  it  is  in  my  (ignorant  and  arrogant) 
private  judgment  inopportune." 

No  single  part  of  this  rough-and-ready  statement 
will  bear  the  meaning  he  regarded  as  obvious.  To 
admit  Papal  Infallibility  to  be  true  was  not  to  desire 
such  a  definition  of  it  as  might  seem  to  countenance 
the  untheological  errors  of  M.  Veuillot.  That  the 
Holy  Ghost  presides  at  a  Council  does  not  mean 
according  to  the  recognized  theologians  that  he  acts 
on  it  by  way  of  direct  inspiration.  The  Council 
takes  the  ordinary  human  steps  for  ascertaining 
theological    truth,    and    the    Holy    Spirit    does    not 


CARDINAL    VAUGHAN  237 

supersede  the  normal  means  supplied  by  Providence 
because  He  protects  the  ultimate  definition  from 
error.  To  urge  that  the  doctrine  should  not  be 
defined  meant  not  to  place  the  judgment  of  an  in- 
dividual against  that  of  the  Holy  Spirit,  but  to  con- 
tribute material  to  the  human  process  of  discussion 
which  the  Holy  Spirit  blesses  in  its  result.  The  cry, 
"  It  is  inopportune,"  was  raised  by  those  who  would 
not  have  opposed  a  weighty  and  purely  theological 
movement  for  the  definition  of  Ultramontane  doctrine. 
It  was  a  war-cry,  or  a  compendious  statement  ex- 
pressing a  protest  against  actually  existing  excesses 
in  the  "new  Ultramontane"  movement.  In  the 
end  the  inopportunist  arguments,  so  carefully  sup- 
pressed in  the  Tablet,  did  issue  in  the  addition  into 
the  Vatican  decree  of  words  emphasizing  the  fact  that 
the  Pontiffs  used  the  human  means  supplied  by 
Providence  for  ascertaining  what  was  in  conformity 
with  Catholic  tradition  and  received  no  direct  revela- 
tion. An  historical  introduction  was  prefixed  to  the 
definition  with  the  avowed  object  of  making  it  clear 
that  the  Pope  "could  not  act  in  judging  of  matters 
of  faith  without  counsel,  deliberation,  and  scientific 
help."1  "I  was  confused,"  Newman  once  wrote, 
"by  the  very  clearness  of  the  logic  which  was  ad- 
ministered to  me."  The  logic  of  the  Tablet  had  this 
confusing  effect.  For  it  shut  out  the  world  of  actually 
existing  thought  on  the  subject  and  confined  itself  to 
the  simple  issues  visible  to  such  as  scarcely  thought 
at  all.  At  the  same  time,  it  cannot  be  denied  that 
there  was  a  disloyal  spirit  in  the  air  among  the 
extreme  Left  which  was  fuel  to  the  flame  of  Father 
Vaughan's    editorial    ardour.       There    were    liberal 

1  See  W.  G.  Ward  and  the  Catholic  Revival,  p.  437. 


238  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

Catholics  who  deserved  both  his  blows  and  his  boy- 
cotting. But  others  were  branded  by  him  who  did 
not  deserve  it,  and  those  were  excluded  from  his  pages 
whose  words  would  have  been  well  worth  reading. 
Dr.  Clifford,  Bishop  of  Clifton,  was  excluded  as  well 
as  Professor  Friedrich. 

The  late  Count  de  Richemont  has  justly  said  that 
the  term  "  liberal  Catholics,"  was  most  unhappily  so 
used  as  to  include  loyal  Catholics  like  Montalernbert 
as  well  as  free-lances  like  Professor  Friedrich  and 
Professor  Froschammer.  It  is  noteworthy  that 
Montalernbert,  with  whom  Vaughan  was  personally 
acquainted,  was  treated  in  the  Tablet  with  the  respect 
he  deserved.  It  was  a  remarkable  instance  of  the 
triumph  of  personal  knowledge  over  that  sometimes 
most  fallacious  guide,  the  logic  of  a  simple  mind. 
The  abstract  reasoning  of  the  Tablet  certainly 
demanded  Montalembert's  execution.  But  personal 
knowledge  made  the  absurdity  of  such  a  sentence 
in  the  case  of  so  loyal  and  devout  a  Catholic  too 
apparent.  It  was  just  the  absence  of  similar  personal 
knowledge  in  other  cases — knowledge  either  of  the 
individual  or  of  the  type — which  led  at  times  to 
censure  as  undeserved  as  would  have  been  that  of 
Montalernbert. 

I  will  not  speak  of  Cardinal  Vaughan's  anxious 
controversy  as  Archbishop  with  the  later  developments 
of  liberal  Catholicism.  As  to  the  Anglican  movement 
on  behalf  of  corporate  reunion,  which  figures  so 
largely  in  the  biography,  one  observation  may  be  here 
in  place.  Words  used  by  the  Cardinal  which  stung 
certain  Anglicans  as  sarcastic  and  uncharitable  were 
in  the  speaker  himself  only  the  straight  and  simple 
expression  of  the  effect  on  himself  of  an  attitude  into 


CARDINAL    VAUGHAN  239 

which  he  could  not  enter.  All  Vaughan's  co-religionists, 
of  course,  feel  the  Anglican  attitude  to  be  illogical. 
But  it  is  a  real  attitude,  and  admits  of  being  stated 
persuasively.     Cardinal  Vaughan  saw  and  stated  it  at 
its  weakest  and  not  at  its  strongest.     He  was,  there- 
fore, to  many  logically  unconvincing  as  well  as  un- 
persuasive.       Cardinal    Newman    never    forgot    the 
anomalous   condition   of    the   Church    in  the    fourth 
century,  when  Arian  Bishops  presided  over  Catholic 
Sees   and   the  laity  had  often  to  hold  the   Catholic 
faith  against  the  views  of  the  local  Bishops.     Here 
was  a  precedent  which  gave  a  superficial  plausibleness 
to   the  position  of   High  Church   Anglicans.     They 
professed    to    hold    Catholic    doctrine    in    spite    of 
Protestant  Bishops,  in  spite  of  State  encroachments, 
waiting  for  better  times.     Vaughan  had  no  such  eye 
to  history  as  could  give  him  this  clue  to  the  Anglican 
mind.     He  showed  up  weak  points  in  their  logic  very 
cogently.     But   probably  his  arguments  would   have 
been    more   convincing  if,  in   place  of  adopting   the 
sarcastic  tone  proper  to  something  very  perverse  and 
extravagant,  he   had  shown  more  of  that  sympathy 
which  comes  from  and  leads  to  understanding — if  he 
had  realized  more  fully  what  did   actually   persuade 
those  he  was  criticizing  that  their  position  was  tenable. 
Yet  any  narrowness  Cardinal  Vaughan  displayed 
was  of  vision  rather  than  of  temper  or  of  heart.     The 
friend    and    admirer   of    the   large-hearted    Cardinal 
Wiseman,  he,  too,   was   in   his  way  a   large-hearted 
man.     He  was  eager  to  learn  from  experience,  and 
experience  did   in   many  cases  mellow  and  broaden 
his  views.     Again,  a  portion  of  the  intolerance  which 
angered  some  critics  was  the  intolerance  which  the 
Church   herself  shows.      To   try   and   liberalize   the 


240  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

Catholic  Church  is  to  destroy  its  distinctive  genius. 
There  is  sternness  inherent  in  its  doctrinal  and  moral 
code  alike.  So  far  as  the  spirit  of  Catholicism  allows 
it,  Vaughan  was  widest  where  he  understood  best. 
He  was  no  stickler  for  red  tape.  On  the  contrary, 
he  was  by  nature  a  reformer.  His  evening  service  at 
the  Salford  Cathedral,  consisting  of  psalms  chanted  in 
English  in  place  of  the  Latin  vespers,  was  an  instance 
in  point.  His  championship,  on  the  ground  of  excep- 
tional qualifications,  of  a  lay  Professor  of  theology  at 
St.  Edmund's  College  was  another.  Both  were 
innovations,  justified,  he  held,  by  their  utility  in  the 
special  circumstances.  That  he  was  not  an  excessive 
ecclesiastical  absolutist  (as  was  sometimes  said)  is 
evident  from  the  last  letter  of  his  life,  in  which  he 
exhorted  his  successor  to  take  counsel  with  the 
Catholic  laity  in  important  diocesan  matters.  "  I 
do  not  know  who  may  follow  me,"  he  wrote,  "  but 
I  earnestly  pray  that  he  may  gather  all,  lay  and 
clergy,  by  union  and  consultation,  in  common  action." 
In  the  intellectual  controversies  above  referred  to  he 
was  not  by  choice  unduly  conservative.  Rather  he 
enforced  authority  and  tradition  which  he  realized  and 
understood  against  interests  which  were  very  vaguely 
visible  to  him.  Few  within  the  Church  so  combine 
insight  into  the  singularly  complex  intellectual  move- 
ments of  the  present  day  with  full  appreciation  of  the 
consequences  of  stern  Catholic  principles,  as  to  take 
successfully  an  active  part  in  those  movements.  In 
England  Cardinal  Newman  long  stood  almost  alone 
in  this  respect.  And  the  caution  and  provisional 
toleration  which  are  the  alternative  for  one  who  is 
anxious  to  avoid  excessive  dogmatism  were  most 
uncongenial   to   such   a   nature   as    Vaughan's.     His 


CARDINAL    VAUGHAN  241 

temperament  prompted  him  to  strenuous  action. 
Strenuous  action  on  liberalistic  lines  was  clearly  out 
of  the  question.  Its  danger  was  apparent  in  writings 
which  were  before  his  eyes.  The  tempting  alternative 
for  one  who  longed  to  be  up  and  doing  was  to  be 
active  in  counteracting  these  dangers.  And  this  might 
easily  drift  into  a  policy  of  complete  opposition  to  all 
that  the  popular  cry  associated  with  liberalism ;  the 
moderate  and  more  discriminating  view  being  dropped 
out  of  sight. 

There  is  both  largeness  of  heart  and  power  of 
imagination  visible  in  many  of  his  letters — not  least 
in  one  written  in  his  last  years  to  the  President  of  a 
Conference  of  the  Catholic  Truth  Society  which  ill- 
health  forbade  him  to  attend.  The  wistful  note  of 
farewell,  the  sympathy  with  the  young  democracy  of 
the  future,  the  dream  of  the  fortunes  of  religion  in  the 
age  to  come,  are  all  human,  gentle,  sympathetic. 

We  older  members  of  the  Society  [he  wrote]  are  begin- 
ning to  move  off  the  scene,  some  slowly  and  reluctantly, 
because  the  work  is  sweet  and  fruitful,  and  our  interest  in  it 
is  as  keen  as  ever ;  some  gladly,  because  they  feel  that  their 
allotted  day's  task  is  nearly  done,  and  they  hear  the  loving 
Voice  that  is  calling  them  home.  But,  whatever  our  feeling, 
we  cannot  help  looking  back  to  see  who  are  following,  who 
are  going  to  take  our  place  and  fill  up  the  ranks.  For  myself, 
I  rejoice  to  see  many  zealous  and  intelligent  members  of 
the  clergy  pressing  forward,  especially  among  the  younger 
clergy,  and  there  is  also  a  goodly  and  increasing  number  of 
men  and  women  among  the  laity.  .  .  .  But,  far  off  in  the 
background,  I  see  a  great  multitude  of  eager  faces,  I  hear 
their  voices  like  the  sound  of  the  waves  of  the  sea.  Who  are 
these  ?  They  are  the  boys  and  girls  in  our  public  elementary 
schools ;  they  are  the  strength,  the  hope,  the  population  of 
the  future.     They  form  the  young  democracy  that  is  going  to 

R 


242  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

rule  the  country,  to  make  or  mar  the  future  of  Christianity. 
These  inspire  me  with  the  keenest  interest.  They  are  young 
and  innocent,  they  are  eager  and  full  of  life,  their  minds  and 
hearts  are  plastic  and  ready  to  take  any  form,  any  direction, 
you  may  impress  upon  them.  If  your  influence  is  the  first 
with  them,  if  you  have  captivated  their  ambition  and  filled 
them  with  ardour  to  follow  you,  you  will  have  secured  the 
success  of  your  enterprise  in  the  future. 

We  know  not  what  may  be  before  the  Catholic  Church  to 
accomplish  during  the  present  century.  But  we  do  know 
that  the  future  depends  upon  the  child,  and  that  it  is  impos- 
sible for  us  to  render  greater  service  to  God  and  to  religion 
than  by  training  the  young  to  become  Apostles  of  Catholic 
Truth. 

I  think  that  the  general  view  of  the  Cardinal's 
qualities  above  suggested  is  confirmed,  while  it  is 
certainly  supplemented,  by  the  admirable  analysis  of 
his  character  printed  in  his  biography  from  the  pen 
of  his  spiritual  director.  Father  Considine  writes 
from  a  special  point  of  view,  but  he  gives  us 
his  own  experience  of  the  honesty,  the  unworldli- 
ness,  the  tenacity  of  purpose  visible  in  the  Cardinal, 
and  at  the  same  time  of  a  simplicity  which  made  him 
at  times  not  fully  realize  the  complex  forces  at  work 
in  the  world  in  which  he  dwelt.  Father  Considine 
depicts  him  as  no  more  completely  at  home  in  dealing 
with  the  diplomatists  than  others  found  him  in  dealing 
with  the  subtlest  intellects.  And  in  planning  out  his 
manifold  religious  and  social  schemes  his  director 
notes  that  habit  of  reckoning  without  full  allowance 
for  the  forces  at  work  in  the  actual  world, — a  charac- 
teristic of  which  I  have  spoken  in  connexion  with 
certain  ecclesiastical  controversies  of  the  day.  This 
analysis  is  so  valuable  that  I  give  it  almost  entire : 

I  should  put  in  the  first  place  in  any  delineation  of  the 


CARDINAL    VAUGHAN  243 

Cardinal's  nature  ...  his  honesty — by  which  I  understand 
his  ingrained  sincerity,  his  desire  to  see  himself  and  to  be 
seen  by  others  exactly  as  he  was — no  better,  no  worse.  He 
cherished  no  illusions  about  himself ;  he  was  aware  of  his 
limitations  and  conversed  quite  simply  about  them.  He  laid 
no  claim  to  any  qualities  or  attainments  he  did  not  possess. 
Above  all  things,  he  loved  plain  dealing  and  plain  speech, 
whether  the  outcome  of  it  might  be  palatable  to  him  or 
not.  .  .  . 

The  Cardinal  carried  his  frankness  and  directness  into  his 
intercourse  with  his  Maker.  He  strove  to  be  entirely  above- 
board  with  Him,  to  hide  nothing,  even  if  he  could,  from  Him 
whose  eyes  search  the  reins  and  the  heart ;  it  was  a  comfort 
as  well  as  a  duty  to  be  open  with  Him,  to  let  Him  hear  from 
one's  own  mouth  the  acknowledgment  of  one's  guilt  and 
promise  of  repentance.  Common  honesty  seemed  to  require 
that  much,  and,  besides,  a  loving  son  could  not  act  otherwise 
towards  the  best  of  Fathers.  And  he  expected  that  God 
would  do  by  him  in  the  same  fashion.  Indeed,  it  was  this 
deep  conviction  of  God's  essential  fairness  and  goodness  that 
He  would  not  be  hard  on  any  one  who  honestly  meant  to  do 
right,  .  .  .  which  made  him  so  fearless  in  action  and  so  un- 
concerned about  temporary  reverses  and  rebuffs.  He  had  no 
doubt  that  all  would  come  right  at  the  last,  let  men  mean- 
while clamour  and  thwart  as  they  pleased. 

This  leads  me  to  speak  of  the  little  account  he  was  dis- 
posed to  make  of  public  opinion,  or  generally  of  those  things 
which  men  esteem  most  highly.  He  was  at  heart  a  thoroughly 
unworldly  man.  Not  that  he  underrated  the  advantages  of 
rank  and  wealth ;  on  the  contrary,  he  was  keenly  alive  to 
them,  and  knew  how  to  use  them  for  God's  service  ;  but  they 
did  not  dazzle  him,  they  could  not  bribe  him.  He  admired 
pomp  and  ceremonial  if  displayed  on  some  fitting  occasion, 
because  he  thought  even  a  secular  function  should  present 
itself  to  the  eye  and  ear  as  worthily  and  impressively  as 
possible,  but  he  had  no  vulgar  love  of  mere  tinsel  and  glitter 
as  such.  And,  of  course,  he  rejoiced  greatly  in  the  seemli- 
ness  and  even  magnificence  of  God's  House  and  of  all  the 
vestments  and  ornaments  allotted  for  its  use.    It  was  a  delight 


J44  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

and  a  comfort  to  him  to  have  been  allowed  before  his  death 
to  make  provision  for  the  solemn  chanting  of  the  Divine 
Office  in  his  own  stately  Cathedral.  However,  worldliness 
does  not  consist  merely  in  a  love  of  finery  and  show,  but 
much  more  in  a  habit  of  mind  which  puts  the  interests  of  this 
life  above  those  of  the  next,  which,  in  fact,  has  no  outlook 
beyond  the  visible  world,  and  therefore  is  necessarily,  in  its 
aspirations,  feelings  and  aims,  of  the  earth,  earthy.  It  in- 
trigues, overreaches,  cajoles,  plays  a  part,  while  professing  to 
be  sincere,  but  under  all  its  disguises  and  through  all  its 
windings  it  is  never  noble  and  never  ceases  to  be  selfish. 
Now,  diplomacy  and  chicane  the  Cardinal  not  only  disliked, 
but  could  hardly  understand  ;  to  him  a  thing  was  right  or 
wrong,  or  true  or  false,  and  no  juggling  with  words  could 
make  it  otherwise.  So  a  course  of  action  approved  itself  to 
him  or  it  did  not — compromises,  modifications,  concessions 
might  perhaps  be  necessary,  but,  nevertheless,  they  never 
quite  satisfied  him,  as  involving  in  some  sense  a  betrayal  of 
the  right.  Hence  he  moved  in  Society  and  dealt  with  great 
personages  of  the  world  as  his  position  seemed  to  require,  but 
he  was  too  sincere  and  simple-minded  to  be  really  at  home 
there.  When  he  was  translated  to  Westminster,  particularly 
after  he  had  received  the  Cardinal's  Hat,  he  regarded  it  as 
his  duty  to  appear  and  speak  in  public  and  to  meet  persons 
of  all  creeds  in  the  intercourse  of  familiar  life.  Afterwards, 
however,  he  came  to  think  that  less  good  was  done  in  that 
way  than  he  had  hoped.  His  motives  were  misunderstood 
and  his  conduct  criticized,  and  in  his  later  years  he  withdrew 
almost  entirely  from  general  society  and  was  inclined  to 
doubt  whether  he  had  not  wasted  much  good  time  on  it  in 
the  past. 

His  power  lay  in  great  ideas,  in  high  thoughts  which  took 
possession  of  him,  shaped  his  conduct,  and  found  expression 
in  his  daily  life,  but  which  he  was  less  successful  in  recom- 
mending by  word  of  mouth  or  by  the  graces  of  personal 
intercourse.  About  the  sincerity  of  his  zeal  for  God's  glory 
there  can  be  no  doubt — indeed,  its  very  fervour  seemed  to 
become  at  times  an  obstacle  to  success.  He  yearned  so 
ardently  for  the  coming  of  Christ's  kingdom  upon  earth  that 


CARDINAL    VAUGHAX  245 

he  chafed  at  the  barriers  to  it  which  men's  passions  and  pre- 
judices are  setting  up  at  every  turn,  and  would  have  liked  to 
make  short  work  of  them,  to  clear  them  out  of  the  way  at 
whatever  cost  to  the  susceptibilities  of  individuals.  Thus  he 
would  outline  some  great  plan  for  the  spread  of  religious 
truth  or  for  social  reform  ;  and  when  he  had  made  up  his 
mind  by  what  help  and  in  what  direction  his  scheme  ought  to 
develop,  he  was  too  ready  to  assume  that  it  must  do  so  with- 
out fail,  and  he  did  not  always  foresee  the  inevitable  checks  it 
must  meet,  nor  was  he  over  well  pleased  when  they  in  fact 
did  occur.  In  his  conception  of  ecclesiastical  problems  he 
sometimes  resembled  the  abstract  mathematician  who  reasons 
of  an  ideal  world,  and  prefers  to  deal  with  bodies  and  move- 
ments unaffected  by  the  actual  conditions  in  which  we  live. 

Whatever  view  may  be  taken  of  Cardinal  Vaughan's 
success  in  solving  some  of  the  more  difficult  problems 
with  which  he  had  to  deal,  I  think  that  his  letters 
show  that  they  cost  him  anxiety ;  that  he  was  too 
honest  not  to  recognize  their  difficulty,  and  too  earnest 
to  be  quite  happy  in  having  to  decide  questions  which 
he  felt  to  be  in  some  degree,  as  he  would  express  it, 
"  out  of  my  line."  "  I  feel,"  he  writes  to  the  Duke  of 
Norfolk,  "  that  I  need  the  help  of  friends  below  as 
well  as  of  God  above  to  keep  such  a  one  as  I  am  at 
all  right  and  free  from  blundering  on  this  critical  and 
dangerous  pinnacle."  If  we  desire  to  see  him  exult- 
ing in  his  strength  and  happy  without  a  cloud  of 
misgiving,  let  us  look  at  the  last  act  of  the  drama  of 
his  life.  It  was  the  building  of  the  Cathedral  which 
gave  full  scope  for  his  zeal,  energy,  and  imagination 
in  regions  where  he  felt  completely  at  home.  His 
action  was  not  delayed  or  hampered  by  any  misgiv- 
ings as  to  its  direction.  He  worked  once  more  as  he 
had  worked  in  early  youth  for  the  missionary  college. 
He  placed  the  enterprise  under  the  patronage  of  St. 


246  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

Joseph,  and  in  two  years  he  had  collected  .£75,000  for 
the  great  enterprise.  He  told  the  story  in  his  speech 
at  the  laying  of  the  foundation  stone. 

He  said  [writes  his  biographer]  that  at  one  time  he  had 
thought  with  anxiety  of  the  large  sum  required.  He  put  the 
whole  matter  in  the  hands  of  St.  Joseph.  From  the  moment 
he  did  so  he  found  his  task  made  quite  easy ;  he  wrote  a  few 
very  simple  letters,  calling  the  attention  of  a  certain  number 
of  his  friends  to  the  proposal.  Without  any  persuasion  on 
his  part,  only  using  the  simplest  words  in  his  power,  those 
friends  at  once,  of  their  own  accord,  responded  with  all  the 
generosity  which  had  brought  about  the  state  of  things  con- 
cerning the  Cathedral  which  had  been  witnessed  that  day, 
when  the  promoters  had  in  their  hands  £7 5,000  towards  the 
building. 

It  may  be  safely  said  [continues  Mr.  Snead-Cox]  that 
that  was  a  time  of  great  happiness  to  Cardinal  Vaughan. 
He  knew  that  his  dream  was  now  certain  to  be  realized. 
And  surely  it  was  no  mean  achievement  to  have  secured  for 
English  Catholicism  in  so  short  a  time  a  Cathedral  of  which 
generations  unborn  shall  be  proud.  The  Cardinal  had  the 
dimensions  of  all  the  great  English  Cathedrals  and  of  many 
abroad  at  his  ringers'  ends,  and  knew  that  in  scale  and  in 
stateliness  his  own  might  compare  with  the  best  Something 
of  the  gladness  and  exultation  he  felt  as  he  watched  the  walls 
slowly  rising  is  reflected  in  an  article  written  under  his  in- 
spiration :  "  The  style  of  the  new  Cathedral  happily  makes 
any  invidious  comparison  with  Westminster  Abbey  out  of  the 
question.  Westminster  Cathedral  will  join  hands  with  an 
older  time.  The  latest  of  the  great  ecclesiastical  structures 
of  the  world,  it  will  recall  the  earliest  phase  of  directly 
Christian  art.  But  though  we  cannot  compare  the  new 
Cathedral  with  any  building  of  the  same  type  in  this  country, 
we  may  usefully  contrast  its  general  scale  and  dimensions 
with  some  of  the  historic  fanes  which  are  still  the  glories  and 
the  memorials  of  English  Catholicism.  In  total  area  the 
Westminster   Cathedral   is   upon   much   the   same   scale  as 


CARDINAL    VAUGHAN  247 

Durham  and  Salisbury  ;  and,  of  course,  far  larger  than  Here- 
ford or  Lichfield  or  Gloucester  or  Worcester  or  Peterborough. 
But  in  its  impression  of  vastness  it  is  likely  to  surpass  even 
the  few  old  Cathedrals  which  exceed  it  in  actual  superficial 
area.  The  length  of  the  nave  is  exactly  that  of  Durham. 
Those  who  recall  the  magnificent  proportions  of  the  great 
northern  Cathedral  will  be  able  to  form  some  adequate  idea 
of  the  scale  of  the  building  which  is  now  rising  at  West- 
minster. Only  with  this  thought  of  Durham  in  his  mind,  let 
the  reader  also  reflect  that  while  at  Durham  the  width  of 
nave  and  aisles  together  is  82  feet,  the  width  of  nave  and 
aisles  at  Westminster  will  be  150  feet.  The  length  of  the 
nave  of  the  new  Cathedral  will  be  exceeded  only  in  the  cases 
of  York,  Winchester,  Ely  and  Salisbury.  In  width  it  far 
exceeds  them  all,  being  27  feet  wider  even  than  the  great 
span  of  York.  .  .  .  As  far  as  scale  goes,  at  any  rate,  the  last 
of  the  English  Cathedrals  may  well  challenge  comparison 
with  anything  that  has  gone  before." 

Few  instances  are  on  record  in  which  a  man  of 
genius  so  rapidly  converted  general  hostility  to 
enthusiastic  admiration  as  did  Mr.  Bentley,  the 
Cardinal's  chosen  architect  for  the  Cathedral.  In  its 
early  stages  his  work  was  the  object  of  a  depreciatory 
— even  of  a  contemptuous — criticism,  which  was 
almost  universal.  When  the  building  approached 
completion,  admiration  was  as  wide-spread.  The 
element  of  tragedy,  however,  was  not  absent  from  the 
drama  of  the  building  of  Westminster  Cathedral. 
Bentley  lived  to  see  an  unfavourable  verdict  reversed  ; 
but  he  died  in  1902  before  his  work  was  finished. 
The  Cardinal  wrote  of  his  fellow-worker  with  feeling 
and  appreciation  : 

The  Cathedral  will  be  his  monument.  For  myself,  I 
have  a  gratification  in  the  thought  that  I  gave  him  a  free 
hand.     Having  laid  down  certain  conditions  as  to  size,  space, 


248  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

chapels  and  style,  I  left  the  rest  to  him.  .  .  .  Mr.  Bentley 
was  a  poet ;  he  saw  and  felt  the  beauty,  the  fancy,  the  har- 
mony and  meaning  of  his  artistic  creations.  He  had  no  love 
of  money,  he  cared  little  for  economy ;  he  had  an  immense 
love  of  art,  a  passion  for  truth  and  sincerity  in  his  work.  He 
was  not  ambitious  to  get  on  ;  he  was  not  self-assertive ;  but 
he  coveted  to  do  well.  He  went  in  search  of  no  work,  but 
waited  for  work  to  come  in  search  of  him.  He  was  ex- 
quisitely gentle  and  considerate  in  dealing  with  suggestions 
and  objections ;  but  he  would  have  his  own  way  whenever  it 
was  a  question  of  fidelity  to  his  own  standard  of  artistic 
execution.  I  would  not  have  singled  him  out  to  build  cheap 
churches  and  schools,  but  he  was  the  best  of  architects  for  a 
Cathedral,  or  for  any  work  that  was  to  excel  in  artistic 
beauty.  He  was  no  mere  copyist,  or  slave  to  tradition  ; 
whatever  he  produced  was  stamped  with  his  own  individu- 
ality ;  it  was  alive  and  original,  and  he  had  a  genius  for 
taking  infinite  pains  with  detail.  His  reverence  for  God,  for 
Our  Lord,  His  Blessed  Mother,  and  the  Saints  pervaded 
everything  he  did  for  the  Church.  In  his  judgments  on  art 
and  style  there  was  a  critical  but  kindly  humour ;  one  always 
felt  that  there  was  an  elevation,  an  inspiration,  in  his  character 
that  was  due  to  his  religious  instincts  and  to  his  unworldly 
standard  of  life.  It  seems  to  me  that  it  will  be  necessary  for 
the  perfection  of  the  work  Mr.  Bentley  left  behind  him,  to 
retain  his  mind  as  a  guide  to  its  completion,  as  far  as  we  can 
know  it. 

If,  as  the  Cardinal  said,  the  Cathedral  is  Bentley's 
monument,  it  is  yet  more  truly  his  own  monument, 
and  a  timely  one,  for  he  died  in  the  following  year, 
and  his  own  Requiem  was  the  first  public  service  in 
the  great  Church  he  had  built.  He  lived,  like  Moses, 
to  see  the  promised  land,  but  not  to  enter  it.  It  was 
nearly  completed,  and  he  was  living  in  the  new 
Archbishop's  House  adjoining  it  when  his  own  time 
came. 


CARDINAL    VAUGHAN  249 

Mr.  Snead-Cox,  who  writes  not  only  with  skill  but 
with  that  genuine  feeling  for  his  subject  which  makes 
a  biography  live,  gives  a  graphic  picture  of  the 
Cardinal's  final  departure  from  Archbishop's  House 
for  Mill  Hill,  where  he  died. 

On  the  morning  of  March  25  he  left  Archbishop's  House 
for  ever.  He  had  sent  me  a  message,  knowing  I  should  wish 
to  be  there.  When  I  arrived  I  was  shown  upstairs,  but 
outside  the  Cardinal's  room  I  found  the  doctor  chafing  and 
impatient.  "  They  are  pestering  him  with  papers,"  he  said, 
"  and  he  is  not  fit  for  it.  He  ought  to  be  carried  downstairs 
in  an  ambulance."  At  last  the  door  opened,  and  the  Cardinal, 
accompanied  by  Mgr.  Johnson,  appeared.  The  Cardinal  was 
wrapped  in  a  big  Roman  cloak  and  looking  wan  and  pale, 
and  as  he  stepped  forward  leaned  heavily  on  his  stick.  A 
few  whispered  words,  and  then  he  slowly  descended  the  stairs. 
At  the  bend  of  the  stairs,  as  we  faced  the  front  door,  there 
was  a  strange  sight.  When  I  had  gone  up,  a  quarter  of  an 
hour  before,  the  hall  was  empty — now  it  was  filled  with  people. 
News  that  the  Cardinal  was  leaving  had  gone  abroad,  and  all 
the  priests  and  students  of  the  Clergy  House,  servants  of  the 
household,  and  a  number  of  friends  were  gathered  there  to 
take  their  last  leave.  As  the  Cardinal  came  forward,  all  that 
little  crowd,  as  by  a  common  impulse,  went  on  its  knees,  and 
the  stricken  man,  as  he  passed  along  through  the  lines  of 
people,  paused  every  few  paces  and  raised  his  hands  to  bless. 
There  were  many  eyes  that  saw  dimly  that  morning,  and  I 
think  we  all  knew  he  was  going  for  ever. 

The  Cardinal  died  in  June,  1903.  Ecce  Sacerdos 
Magnus  is  the  Church's  salute  to  her  Prelates ;  and  he 
was  great  in  all  the  distinctive  attributes  of  the  priest- 
hood. If  in  attempting  some  analysis  of  his  gifts 
I  have  also  endeavoured  to  ascertain  what  he  had 
not  as  well  as  what  he  had,  it  has  been  partly  in 
order  to  account  for  the  fact  that  his  great  qualities 


250  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

were  not  universally  recognized  in  his  lifetime. 
One  with  a  subtler  power  of  influencing  the  public 
mind  would  have  been  more  universally  understood 
from  the  first.  But  in  the  long  run  character  tells, 
and  the  whole  man  now  stands  before  us  visible  to 
every  reader  of  Mr.  Snead-Cox's  pages.  His 
deficiencies  are  there  seen  to  be  largely  the  defects  of 
great  qualities.  Indeed,  from  some  readers  this  man 
of  noble,  single  and  complete  nature  will  call  forth 
greater  sympathy  than  those  who  are  strong  where 
Vaughan  was  weak.  The  anxious  thinker  and 
philosopher  who  hesitates  in  his  course  because  he 
sees  much  that  is  invisible  to  the  world  at  large,  is  to 
many  a  far  less  stimulating  figure  than  the  man  who 
sees  only  a  few  great  principles,  and  acts  on  them 
with  energy  and  heroic  devotedness.  Let  such 
comparisons  stand  aside.  Each  has  his  own  work — 
the  thinker  and  the  man  of  action.  Each  will  be  best 
appreciated  on  earth  by  those  who  see  best  that 
particular  sphere  which  the  action  of  each  most 
successfully  affects.  In  a  world  in  which  there  is 
no  twilight  both  will  be  seen  to  have  done  a  work 
meritorious  in  proportion  to  the  singleness  of  its  aim, 
useful  in  proportion  to  its  success  in  helping  those 
whom  their  tasks  most  closely  concern. 


VII 

TENNYSON   AT   FRESHWATER 

The  Freshwater  society  of  which  Tennyson  was  the 
centre  in  the  'sixties  and  'seventies  approached,  I  think, 
nearer  to  realizing  the  purpose  and  ideal  of  a  French 
salon  than  any  social  group  I  have  myself  known  in 
England.  It  is,  of  course,  startling  to  compare  people 
who  met  in  the  most  informal  way  in  the  green  lanes 
of  the  Isle  of  Wight,  and  at  the  houses  of  friends  who 
were  for  the  most  part  in  no  sense  people  of  fashion, 
with  such  a  Parisian  coterie  as  was  grouped  around 
Madame  Recamier  and  Chateaubriand.  Neverthe- 
less, it  appears  to  me  that  the  ideal  of  the  salon,  which 
has  proved  so  impossible  to  realize  in  London,  was 
largely  realized  in  Freshwater.  We  had  our  Chateau- 
briand in  Tennyson,  and,  surprising  as  the  comparison 
may  be,  we  had  our  Madame  Recamier  in  Mrs. 
Cameron.  The  essential  work  of  gathering  together 
the  interesting  people  who  were  to  form  the  Tennyson 
society,  the  enthusiasm  for  the  hero  and  for  genius  in 
general,  was  Mrs.  Cameron's  part,  as  it  was  Madame 
R£camier's. 

Mrs.  Cameron,  indeed,  was  no  youthful  beauty, 
but  she  was  a  woman  of  great  originality  and  of  most 
single-hearted  devotion  to  genius.  She  was  one  of 
the   gifted   daughters  of  Mr.    Pattle,  a   Bengal  civil 


252  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

servant — a  sister  of  the  late  Lady  Somers  and  Lady 
Dalrymple.  She  had  not  the  beauty  of  her  sisters, 
but  her  appreciation  of  beauty  was  as  keen  as  her 
appreciation  of  intellect.  A  beautiful  woman  who 
chanced  to  stay  in  Freshwater  was  soon  discovered 
by  her,  and  figured  in  her  well-known  and  very  artistic 
photographs.  Thus  beauty  came  to  be  well  repre- 
sented among  those  who  formed  the  group  of  which 
I  speak.  It  was  a  society  for  which  personal  qualities 
were  the  chief  passport.  The  complications  which 
the  London  world  brings — in  which  rank,  fashion,  and 
official  position  are  the  chief  titles  to  distinction — may 
prove  fatal  to  the  ideal  of  the  salon.  They  make  a 
wholly  different  ideal  too  prominent.  Rank  and 
fashion  were  indeed  often  represented  among  the 
visitors  to  Freshwater,  who  for  the  time  joined  the 
Tennyson  circle ;  but  their  representatives  had  to 
remember  their  true  place  in  Tennyson-land — a  sub- 
ordinate one.  It  is,  I  take  it,  of  the  essence  of  the 
salon  that  the  sense  of  distinction  which  is  a  part  of 
its  attraction,  is  given  principally  by  the  presence  of 
acknowledged  genius ;  and  the  atmosphere  prevailing 
must  be  that  of  recognition  of  genius  as  supremely 
interesting  and  important.  These  two  qualities  were 
given  by  the  presence  of  Tennyson,  and  by  the  gift 
which  Mrs.  Cameron  had  for  creating  the  atmosphere 
that  was  wanted.  And  the  actual  conversation  was 
real,  wide  in  its  range,  and  often  excessively  interest- 
ing. It  went  beyond  the  mere  snatches  of  serious 
conversation  which  one  hears  at  a  London  dinner 
party. 

The  events  in  the  literary  world,  and  still  more  in 
the  scientific  world,  interested  the  poet  profoundly, 
and  his  judgments  were  always  weighty.     Details  of 


TENNYSON  AT  FRESHWATER  253 

scholarship,  and  classical  literature  itself  were  also 
welcome  topics.  And  he  would  talk  of  them  on  equal 
terms  with  Richard  Jebb  or  Henry  Butcher.  Tennyson 
had  an  excellent  verbal  memory,  and  the  discussions 
on  English  poetry  which  he  would  carry  on  with 
Aubrey  de  Vere  or  Sir  Henry  Taylor  were  studded 
with  quotations.  But  he  loved,  too,  to  hear  from 
some  traveller  how  men  lived  and  what  they  believed 
in  parts  of  this  wonderful  world  which  he  could  never 
himself  visit.  If  Tyndall  or  Browning  appeared  on 
the  scene  it  was  not  merely  that  we  saw  great  men  as 
one  might  see  them  at  a  large  evening  party.  We 
heard  them  talk,  and  not  formally  or  for  display,  but 
in  undress.  They  "let  themselves  go"  to  a  degree 
rarely  if  ever  possible  in  London  society.  We  were 
at  leisure  and  the  trammels  of  convention  were 
banished.  In  London  the  wings  of  the  immortals 
are  clipped.  The  conversation  at  Freshwater  was 
stamped  by  the  simplicity,  directness,  and  wide  range 
of  interests  which  marked  Tennyson  himself.  He 
gave  the  tone  to  his  company.  We  all  felt,  more- 
over, in  those  days  that  we  were  in  the  making  of 
history.  Tennyson  was  in  the  heyday  of  his  fame 
in  the  'sixties.  The  Idylls  of  the  King  were  being 
written;  the  word  would  pass  in  Freshwater  that  a 
fresh  one  was  on  its  road,  greater,  it  was  usually 
added,  than  any  which  had  gone  before.  Thus 
reported  Mrs.  Cameron  or  Miss  Thackeray  or  Miss 
Simeon  who  had  actually  heard  the  poet  read  it. 
I  myself  used  to  hear  the  unpublished  poems  later 
on ;  but  the  poems  of  the  'sixties,  written  in  my  boy- 
hood, were  greater  events — even  national  events. 

The  group  that  gathered  round  Tennyson  formed 
a   society    from    which    unsuitable   or   unsympathetic 


254  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

elements  ought  to  have  been  rigidly  excluded — more 
rigidly  even  than  they  were.  Outsiders  with  little 
appreciation  of  literary  greatness — who  merely  lionized 
Tennyson  as  a  famous  man — were  sometimes  irritated 
at  the  quality  of  our  enthusiasm,  and  almost  incredu- 
lous of  its  sincerity.  They  could  not  enter  into  the 
feelings  of  those  who  felt  genius  to  be  a  far  greater 
thing  than  wealth  or  position.  They  knew  a  "  lion," 
but  not  a  prophet  or  seer.  Tennyson  was  the  first 
to  them,  the  last  to  us.  Their  account  to  others  of 
the  poet  and  his  friends  would,  therefore,  strike  a 
wholly  false  note.  Was  there  some  French  Sir 
Gorgius  Midas  in  the  days  of  the  first  Empire, 
and  did  he  accidentally  gain  entrance  to  Madame 
Recamier's  salon  ?  If  so,  we  can  fancy  his  annoy- 
ance at  finding  Chateaubriand — u  a  conceited  French- 
man, a  writer  he  believed  " — made  so  much  more  of 
by  the  great  ladies  than  any  one  else,  including  Sir 
Gorgius  himself  with  his  millions,  and  (I  had  almost 
said,  for  it  marks  the  standard)  his  motors.  Some 
such  note  was  occasionally  struck  when  the  wrong 
people  found  themselves  in  Freshwater.  And  there 
were  some  belonging  to  a  better  class  than  Sir 
Gorgius  Midas  who  proved  to  be  "wrong  people." 
Such  intruders  had  no  instinct  which  could  detect  or 
interpret  the  enthusiasm  of  Tennyson's  true  admirers. 
They  took  stock  of  all  they  could  see — namely,  the 
external  signs — and  traced  them  to  the  only  source 
their  categories  supplied,  describing  them  as  "adula- 
tion "  of  the  poet.  The  distinction  between  lionizing 
and  hero  worship  was  simply  unintelligible  to  them. 
It  was  such  outsiders  who  were  also  mainly  responsible 
for  the  utterly  false  idea  of  Tennyson's  attitude 
towards   his  admirers,   which    is    in   some   quarters 


TENNYSON  AT  FRESHWATER  255 

still  current — as  though  he  delighted  in  the  conversa- 
tion of  flatterers. 

On  the  other  hand  there  were  members  of  the 
great  world,  like  the  Duke  of  Argyll  and  Lord 
Selborne — and  of  Tennyson's  intercourse  with  the 
latter  I  could  speak  from  personal  memory — who  fell 
in  completely  with  the  tone  and  feeling  of  Freshwater 
when  they  came  there.  They  realized  as  much  as 
those  to  whom  literature  was  everything,  that  there 
was  a  sphere  in  which  Tennyson  was  a  king.  And 
they  so  treated  him,  intensely  grateful  for  his  poems, 
and  eager  to  place  a  crown  of  laurels  on  his  head.1 

If  one  is  to  speak  of  the  general  atmosphere  at 
Freshwater,  not  of  exceptional  incidents,  I  think  no 
estimate  could  be  more  false  than  that  of  the  rich 
Philistine.  Our  enthusiasm  had  the  genuine  ring 
which  flattery  never  has.  If  it  was  sometimes  indis- 
criminate, that  was  the  intellectual  fault  of  youth 
rather  than  a  moral  flaw.  Tennyson's  acceptance 
of  the  homage  paid  to  him  was  the  gratitude  which 
sensitive  genius  could  not  have  withheld  without 
marked  ungraciousness.  Also  Tennyson,  it  must  be 
remembered,  suffered  keenly  from  bad  criticism  of  his 
poems,  as  one  may  suffer  from  loud  discordant  sounds 
when  one  is  playing  a  beautiful  sonata.  And  he  took, 
perhaps,  some  compensating  pleasure  when  he  saw 
that  he  was  speaking  no  longer  to  deaf  or  dull  ears, 
but  to  the  perceiving  and  the  grateful.  This  feeling 
no  doubt  had  its  place  in  his  friendships  but  not  a 
large  place  in  his  conversation.     For  the   range  of 

1  He  was  to  Lord  Selborne  "the  foremost  man  of  all  his  generation 
and  entitled  to  be  ranked  with  the  greatest  of  the  generations  before 
him."  And  the  Duke  of  Argyll  accounts  his  friendship  as  "one  of  the 
greatest  honours  of  his  life."    (See  Tcnnysoris  Life,  ii.  pp.  458,  516.) 


256  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

his  talk  was,  as  I  have  already  said,  very  wide,  and 
took  in  the  most  diverse  topics  wholly  unconnected 
with  himself. 

I  used  to  think  his  intimacy  with  Jowett  a  good 
index  of  the  intercourse  Tennyson  most  enjoyed. 
Jowett's  unbounded  admiration  for  Tennyson  never 
even  tended  to  obsequiousness,  nor  impaired  the 
absolute  freedom  of  his  conversation.  And  I  had 
many  opportunities  of  observing  their  intercourse.  I 
do  not  think  any  one  worshipped  the  poet  more 
sincerely  than  Jowett,  and  in  using  the  word 
"  worship"  I  do  not  exaggerate. 

I  recollect  once  at  Farringford  listening  with  Jowett  after 
dinner  to  Tennyson's  reading  of  his  Ode  on  the  Death  of 
the  Duke  of  Wellington.  It  was  a  poem  which  his  peculiar 
chant  made  most  moving,  and  he  read  the  concluding  lines 
with  special  pathos  : 

Speak  no  more  of  his  renown, 
Lay  your  earthly  fancies  down, 
And  in  the  vast  cathedral  leave  him, 
God  accept  him,  Christ  receive  him. 

Tennyson  then  turned  to  address  some  observation  to  Jowett, 
but  no  reply  came,  and  we  soon  saw  that  the  master  was 
unable  to  speak.  The  tears  were  streaming  down  his  cheeks. 
I  ventured  to  allude  to  this  some  time  later  in  talking  to 
Jowett,  and  he  said  :  "  What  would  you  have  ?  The  two 
Englishmen  for  whom  I  have  the  deepest  feeling  of  reverence 
are  Tennyson  and  the  great  Duke  of  Wellington.  And  one 
of  them  was  reading  what  he  had  himself  written  in  admira- 
tion of  the  other !  "  * 

Yet  Jowett  would  talk  to  Tennyson  with  the 
utmost  freedom.  He  would  make  jokes  to  the  poet's 
face   on  which  few  other  people  would  venture.     I 

1   Tennyson  and  His  Friends^  p.  227. 


TENNYSON  AT  FRESHWATER  257 

once  heard  them  talk  on  the  very  subject  of  flattery. 
Tennyson  was  inveighing  vigorously  against  flattery 
as  representing  a  base  side  of  human  nature,  and 
ended  by  saying  :  "  No  flatterer  is  a  friend  of  mine." 
He  looked  at  Jowett  for  assent,  but  Jowett  did  not 
reply.  "  Don't  you  agree  with  me  ? "  Tennyson 
insisted.  Jowett  smiled  a  little  mischievously,  and 
answered  in  his  staccato  tones.  "  Well,  Tennyson, 
while  you  have  been  talking  I  have  been  reflecting 
that  in  this  house  and  in  this  room  I  have  seen  a  good 
deal  of  incense  offered.  And  it  was  not  unacceptable." 
The  entire  good  humour  with  which  Tennyson  took 
this  repartee  carried  to  my  mind  complete  conviction 
that  it  did  not  really  hit  him  at  all.  He  took  the 
remark  quite  simply  for  the  joke  it  was  meant  to  be. 
His  dislike  of  the  genus  "  flatterer  "  was  most  genuine. 
I  could  quote  instances  of  it ;  and  it  was  not  appreci- 
ably qualified  by  such  satisfaction  as  he,  like  other 
poets,  might  take  in  the  signs  that  his  genius  was 
recognized.  But,  indeed,  that  satisfaction  was  below 
the  average,  not  above  it ;  and  Jowett  hardly  ex- 
aggerates, I  think,  in  his  written  words  on  this  subject 
which  appear  in  Tennyson s  Life.  "Tennyson  ex- 
perienced," he  writes,  "  a  great  deal  of  pain  from  the 
attacks  of  his  enemies.  I  never  remember  his  re- 
ceiving the  least  pleasure  from  the  commendation  of 
his  friends." 

Mrs.  Cameron  had,  as  I  have  intimated,  much  to 
do  with  forming  the  society  of  Freshwater.  She  was 
a  real  social  centre.  And  this  was  in  itself  remark- 
able. For  her  cottage  of  Dimbola  seemed  made  for 
the  simple  life  rather  than  for  luxury  or  for  entertain- 
ment. Everything  about  it  was  unpretentious  and 
unconventional.     But  her  keen,  eager  spirit,  created 

s 


258  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

by  its  natural  force  a  world  of  incident  and  interest. 
And  by  the  true  instinct  which  draws  like  to  like,  such 
men  of  genius  as  Tyndall,  Darwin,  Aubrey  de  Vere, 
Sir  Henry  Taylor,  were  among  her  visitors,  and  so 
many  more  that  to  attempt  a  list  would  be  tedious. 
I  have  before  me  the  inscription  on  one  of  her  photo- 
graphs of  Tennyson  which  she  gave  to  "  Philip,"  as 
she  called  her  dear  friend  Sir  Henry  Taylor — the 
author  of  Philip  van  Artavelde.  It  represents 
vividly  the  atmosphere  of  those  days,  and  her  place  in 
forming  it : 

A  gift  transferred  with  much  love  to  dear  Philip.  This 
photo  done  by  my  will  against  his  will — a  column  of  ever- 
lasting grandeur.     June,  1863. 

The  "  by  my  will  against  his  will "  is  very  significant. 
She  not  only  insisted  on  photographing  Tennyson, 
but  used  to  make  him  show  himself  on  occasion,  and 
do  whatever  she  thought  suitable  to  his  genius  and 
position,  while  he  often  endeavoured,  half  annoyed, 
half  pleased,  to  frustrate  her  designs.  Sometimes  her 
plans  for  symbolizing  his  greatness  were  extremely 
quaint.  On  one  occasion  (in  1873)  sne  t0°k  it  into 
her  head  that  the  great  monarch  of  Freshwater  ought, 
like  the  Doge  of  Venice,  to  wed  the  sea.  She  bade 
one  of  the  Simeon  family,1  who  was  in  Freshwater  at 
the  time,  make  a  wreath  of  white  and  red  may,  to  take 
the  place  of  a  ring,  and  proceeded  with  some  friends 
in  solemn  procession  to  Farringford,  to  persuade  the 
bard  to  do  her  will.  In  the  end  she  succeeded  in 
bringing  him  with  her  to  Freshwater  Bay,  and  making 
him  throw  the  wreath  into  the  sea  and  speak  words 
worthy  of  the  occasion. 

1  Mr.  Stephen  Simeon. 


TENNYSON  AT  FRESHWATER  259 

Tennyson  loved  Mrs.  Cameron  sincerely,  and  was 
amused  at  her  intense  hero  worship.  "  All  her  geese 
are  swans,  and  all  her  Taylors  are  gods,"  he  once 
said. 

She  was  almost  an  official  mistress  of  ceremonies 
for  those  who  desired  an  interview  with  Tennyson. 
The  story  has  been  told  before  now  of  her  bringing 
some  American  visitors  to  Farringford  at  a  moment 
when  Tennyson  was  a  good  deal  out  of  humour,  and 
showed  it  to  his  guests  too  plainly.  She  rebuked  him 
with  the  words  :  "  Alfred,  I  brought  them  to  see  a 
lion  ;  they  did  not  expect  to  find  a  bear !  ' 

Mrs.  Cameron  was  profoundly  interested  in  keep- 
ing the  poet  well,  and  fit  for  work.     One  evening  a 
friend  who  was  dining  with  her  mentioned  that  there 
was  small-pox  in  the  neighbourhood.     Mrs.  Cameron 
started.     "  Alfred  Tennyson  has  not  been  vaccinated 
for  twenty  years,"  she  said.     "We  must  not  lose  a 
moment."     She  went  at  once  in  search  of  the  village 
doctor,  took  him  to  Farringford,  and  made  her  way 
to  Tennyson's  study.     He  was  busy  and  did  not  want 
to  see  her,  but  she  pursued  him  from  room  to  room. 
In  the  end  he  said :  "  Madam,  if  you  will  leave  me 
I   will  do  anything   you  like."     He  was  vaccinated. 
The  sequel  was  told  me  by  Tennyson  himself.     The 
vaccine   proved   to   be  bad,  and    he   was   not  really 
well  again  for  six  months,  so  Mrs.  Cameron's  inter 
vention  did  not  prove  quite  so  fortunate  as  she  had 
hoped. 

Mrs.  Cameron  corresponded  frequently  with  some 
of  the  great  lights  of  science  and  literature — to  Sir 
Henry  Taylor  she  wrote  almost  daily.  But,  indeed, 
her  general  correspondence  was  enormous.  There 
were  certain  days — I   think  just  before  the  mail  to 


260  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

Ceylon — when  the  writing  was  at  extraordinarily  high 
pressure.  Then  she  stood  at  her  high  desk,  complet- 
ing letter  after  letter,  and  throwing  each  down  on  the 
floor ;  and  even  after  the  ordinary  post  had  gone 
there  was  a  special  messenger  whom  she  called  "  Deer 
Foot,"  who  ran  with  her  "overflow"  letters  to  catch 
the  boat  at  the  last  moment.  She  photographed  her 
"  lions  "  when  they  came  to  Freshwater.  Those  large 
photographs,  some  of  them  real  works  of  art,  are  still 
to  be  seen  in  many  houses  in  the  Isle  of  Wight  and 
elsewhere — of  Darwin,  of  Herschel,  of  Browning,  of 
Carlyle,  and  many  another.  She  also  photographed 
her  friends,  and  I  was  more  than  once  the  recipient 
of  her  attentions  in  this  respect.  I  remember  being 
photographed  once  as  a  Roman  in  a  toga,  and  once 
dressed  as  a  Bravo.  As  a  boy  I  wore  my  hair  rather 
long,  and  she  was  quite  convinced  that,  as  I  was  a 
Catholic,  my  father  and  mother  would  make  me  part 
with  it  all  and  be  a  monk  when  I  grew  up.  So  she 
looked  at  the  hair  with  a  kind  of  sad  fondness,  as  a 
thing  that  must  die  young. 

She  chose  her  parlourmaids  largely  for  their  beauty, 
and  one  of  them  in  the  end  made  a  very  good  marriage. 
There  were  two  "  Marys"  whom  she  would  sometimes 
in  the  most  unconventional  way  take  with  her  into 
society.  On  one  occasion  when  the  Simeons  asked 
her  to  come  to  the  Cowes  Regatta,  somewhat  to  their 
surprise  the  Marys  appeared  in  her  train.  But  the 
result  was  most  embarrassing  to  Mrs.  Cameron,  as 
some  of  the  more  susceptible  young  men  of  the  party 
paid  them  attentions  which  made  the  duties  of  a 
chaperon  very  onerous.  She  would  show  off  to  her 
friends  the  Mary  who  was  called,  from  the  shape  of 
her  face,  "  Madonna,"  using  various  devices  to  exhibit 


TENNYSON  AT  FRESHWATER  261 

her  to  the  best  advantage.  "  Mary,  do  stand  on  that 
chair  and  pull  down  that  high  curtain."  Then,  turn- 
ing to  her  friend  :  "  Isn't  she  perfect  in  that  light,  and 
in  profile  as  you  see  her  now  ? "  In  the  same  way 
she  would  exhibit  her  wonderfully  picturesque  old 
white-haired  husband.  One  went  on  tiptoe  to  the 
door  of  his  study,  a  crack  of  which  was  opened  noise- 
lessly. M  There  he  is,  reading  his  Greek  ;  doesn't  he 
look  grand  ?  " 

The  high-water  mark  for  interest  in  Freshwater 
society  was  perhaps  reached  in  1873  when  G.  F. 
Watts  and  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Prinsep  (the  latter  a  sister 
of  Mrs.  Cameron)  came  to  live  at  the  Briery,  close 
to  Farringford.  In  1874  Mrs.  Cameron  left  the  Isle 
of  Wight  for  Ceylon. 

Tennyson's  brothers  used  occasionally  to  appear 
in  Freshwater,  and  his  sister — old  Miss  Matilda 
Tennyson.  There  was  a  very  marked  family  likeness 
in  all  the  Tennysons  whom  I  recall  to  mind.  The 
combination  in  them  of  strenuous  hardiness,  with  a 
keen  sense  of  the  poetry  in  life,  used  to  give  me  the 
feeling  I  had  in  reading  La  Motte  Fouque  s  stories 
of  the  old  Norsemen.  The  brothers  seemed  to  me 
to  dress  alike,  and  at  a  little  distance  off,  Horatio 
Tennyson  or  Arthur  Tennyson  might  easily  have 
been  mistaken  for  the  poet.  They  all  spoke,  too, 
with  a  strong  Lincolnshire  accent.  Something  of 
their  character  is  perhaps  indicated  in  a  chance  remark 
of  Arthur  Tennyson's  to  a  friend  whom  he  met  in  the 
Freshwater  lanes  one  fine  April  morning.  In  response 
to  inquiries  after  his  health  (he  was  a  man  of  81),  he 
replied  :  "  I  can't  help  being  troubled  by  the  terrible 
excitement  of  the  spring."  There  was  in  the  whole 
family  something  of  the  poet  who  is  ever  young. 


?62  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

As  Isle  of  Wight  reminiscences  are  to  form  the 
staple  of  my  essay,  I  may  say  a  word  concerning 
Tennyson's  old  friend  and  my  father's — Sir  John 
Simeon.  Tennyson's  friendship  with  Sir  John  Simeon 
came  to  an  end  with  his  death  in  1870,  just  before 
that  with  my  father  began.1  Tennyson  has  spoken 
of  his  own  friendship  with  each  in  his  verse,  and  I 
may  here  record  what  I  heard  long  ago,  and  have 
recently  learnt  in  greater  detail  as  to  the  writing  of 
the  beautiful  verses  In  the  Garden  at  Swains  ton, 
just  before  Simeon's  funeral  in  1870. 

Tennyson  reached  Swainston  some  time  before 
the  cortege  was  to  start,  and  he  asked  Sir  John's 
eldest  boy — a  lad  of  20 — to  give  him  an  old  hat  and 
cloak  of  his  father's,  and  his  pipe.  "  Come  for  me 
yourself,"  he  added,  "  when  it  is  time  to  start,  and  do 
not  send  a  servant."  Young  Simeon  came  when  the 
hour  had  arrived,  and  found  Tennyson  smoking  his 
father's  pipe,  and  wearing  his  father's  hat  and  cloak, 
stretched  at  full  length  under  a  tree  in  the  garden,  the 
tears  streaming  from  his  eyes,  and  the  MS.  of  the 
poem  written. 

Concerning  Tennyson's  friendship  with  my  father 
I  may  be  allowed  to  quote  some  paragraphs  from  my 
contribution  to  Lord  Tennyson's  volume  : 

Tennyson's  friendship  with  my  father  began  at  a  date 
considerably  subsequent  to  their  first  acquaintance.  My 
father  came  rather  unexpectedly  into  the  family  property  in 
the  Isle  of  Wight  in  1849,  when  his  uncle  died  without  a  son  ; 
but  he  did  not  desire  to  leave  the  house  Pugin  had  built  for 

1  My  father's  own  intercourse  with  Sir  John  Simeon,  with  whom  he 
had  been  intimate  in  early  life,  almost  ceased  in  the  'sixties,  owing  to 
Simeon's  hostility  to  the  Temporal  Power  of  the  Papacy,  which  was  a 
great  bone  of  contention  among  Catholics  in  those  days. 


TENNYSON  AT  FRESHWATER  263 

him  in  Hertfordshire,  where  he  had  settled  immediately  after 
he  joined  the  Catholic  Church  in  1845.  He  and  the  late 
Cardinal  Vaughan  were,  in  the  'fifties,  doing  a  work  for 
ecclesiastical  education  at  St.  Edmund's  College,  Ware — a 
work  which  came  to  my  father  naturally  as  the  sequel  to  his 
share  in  the  Oxford  Movement.  Therefore,  when  Tennyson, 
in  1853,  came  to  live  in  the  Isle  of  Wight,  my  father  was  an 
absentee.  He  tried  in  1858  for  two  years  to  live  at  his  grand- 
father's old  home  near  Cowes,  Northwood  Park,  but  his  health 
broke  down,  and  he  returned  to  Hertfordshire.  In  the  'sixties, 
however,  he  used  to  pay  long  visits  to  Freshwater,  in  the 
scenery  of  which  he  delighted  ;  and  on  one  of  these  occasions, 
Tennyson  was  introduced  to  him  by  their  common  friend, 
Dean  Bradley.  The  meeting  was  not,  I  think,  a  great  success 
on  either  side.  Later  on,  however,  in  1870,  when  my  father, 
despairing  of  the  Cowes  climate,  built  a  house  at  Freshwater, 
he  was  Tennyson's  near  neighbour,  and  they  soon  became 
friends. 

Tennyson's  friendship  with  my  father  grew  up  from  close 
neighbourhood,  and  from  the  fact  that  they  had  so  much 
more  in  common  with  each  other  than  with  most  of  their  Isle 
of  Wight  neighbours.  It  was  cemented  by  my  father's 
devotion  to  Mrs.  (afterwards  Lady)  Tennyson,  who,  in  her 
conversation,  he  always  said,  reminded  him  of  the  John  Henry 
Newman  of  Oxford  days.  Also  they  had  many  friends  in 
common — such  as  Dean  Stanley,  Lord  Selborne,  and  Jowett 
— who  often  visited  Freshwater.  They  were  both  members 
of  the  Metaphysical  Society,  and  loved  to  discuss  in  private 
problems  of  religious  faith  which  formed  the  subject  of  the 
Society's  debates.  They  were  also  both  great  Shakespearians. 
But  most  of  all  they  were  drawn  together  by  a  simplicity  and 
directness  of  mind,  in  which,  I  think,  they  had  few  rivals — if 
I  may  say  of  my  own  father  what  every  one  else  said. 
Nevertheless,  their  intimacy  was  almost  as  remarkable  for 
diversity  of  interests  as  for  similarity.  It  might  seem  at  first 
sight  to  be  a  point  of  similarity  between  them  that  each 
revelled  in  his  way  in  the  scenery  of  the  beautiful  island  which 
was  their  home.  Yet  the  love  of  external  nature  was  very 
different  in  the  two  men.     It  had  that  marked  contrast  which 


264  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

Ruskin  has  described  in  his  Modern  Painters.  Ruskin  con- 
trasts three  typical  ways  of  being  affected  by  what  is  beautiful. 
There  is  first  "  the  man  who  perceives  rightly  because  he  does 
not  feel,  and  to  whom  the  primrose  is  very  accurately  the 
primrose  because  he  does  not  love  it.  Then,  secondly,  the 
man  who  perceives  wrongly  because  he  feels,  and  to  whom 
the  primrose  is  anything  else  than  a  primrose — a  star,  or  a 
sun,  or  a  fairy's  shield,  or  a  forsaken  maiden.  And  then 
lastly,  there  is  the  man  who  perceives  rightly  in  spite  of  his 
feelings,  and  to  whom  the  primrose  is  for  ever  nothing  else 
than  itself — a  little  flower  apprehended  in  the  very  plain  and 
leafy  fact  of  it,  whatever  and  how  many  soever  the  associations 
and  passions  may  be  that  crowd  around  it." 

My  father's  imagination  was  of  the  second  order,  Tenny- 
son's of  the  third.  My  father  often  perceived  wrongly,  or  not 
at  all,  because  he  felt  so  strongly.  Consequently,  while  the 
bold  outlines  of  mountain  scenery  and  the  large  vistas  of  sea 
and  down  in  the  Isle  of  Wight  moved  him  greatly,  he  did  not 
look  at  them  with  the  accurate  eye  of  an  artist ;  and  the 
minute  beauty  of  flowers  and  trees  was  non-existent  for 
him.  Tennyson,  on  the  contrary,  had  the  most  delicate  and 
true  perception  of  the  minute  as  well  as  the  great.  Each  man 
chose  for  his  home  a  site  which  suited  his  taste.  Weston  was 
on  a  high  hill  with  a  wide  view.  Farringford  was  lower  down 
and  buried  in  trees.  The  two  men  used  sometimes  to  walk 
together  on  the  great  Down  which  stretches  from  the  Needles 
rocks  to  Freshwater  Bay,  on  which  the  boundary  between 
Tennyson's  property  and  my  father's  is  marked  by  the  dyke 
beyond  the  Tennyson  memorial  cross.  At  other  times  they 
walked  in  the  Freshwater  lanes.  And  there  was  a  suggestion 
in  these  different  surroundings  of  their  sympathy  and  of  their 
difference.  The  immense  expanse  of  scenery  visible  from 
the  Beacon  Down  was  equally  inspiring  to  both,  but  the  lanes 
and  fields  which  were  full  of  inspiration  to  Tennyson  had 
nothing  in  them  which  appealed  to  W.  G.  Ward.  If  he  heard 
a  bird  singing,  the  only  suggestion  it  conveyed  to  him  was  of 
a  tiresome  being  who  kept  him  awake  at  night.  Trees  were 
only  the  unpleasant  screens  which  stood  in  the  way  of  the 
view  of  the  Solent  from  his  house,  and  which  he  cut  down  as 


TENNYSON  AT  FRESHWATER  265 

fast  as  they  grew  up.  To  Tennyson,  on  the  contrary — as  we 
see  constantly  in  his  poetry — there  was  a  whole  world  of 
interest  in  Nature  created  by  his  knowledge  of  botany  and 
natural  history,  as  well  as  by  his  exceptionally  accurate  and 
observant  eye.  .  .  . 

When  Tennyson  and  W.  G.  Ward  walked  together  there 
was  then  a  most  curious  contrast  in  their  attitude  towards  the 
Nature  that  surrounded  them, — Tennyson  noting  every  bird, 
every  flower,  every  tree,  as  he  passed  it ;  Ward  buried  in  the 
conversation,  and  alive  only  to  the  great,  broad  effects  in  the 
surrounding  country.  .  .  . 

W.  G.  Ward  was  himself  not  only  no  poet,  but  almost 
barbarously  indifferent  to  poetry,  with  some  few  exceptions. 
He  was  exceedingly  frank  with  Tennyson,  and  plainly  inti- 
mated to  him  that  there  was  very  little  in  his  poetry  that  he 
understood  or  cared  for.  But  this  fact  never  impaired  their 
friendship.  Indeed,  I  think  Tennyson  enjoyed  his  almost 
eccentric  candour  in  this  and  in  other  matters,  and  he  used, 
in  later  years,  to  tell  me  stories  which  illustrated  it.  .  .  . 
W.  G.  Ward's  extreme  frankness  led  Tennyson  to  remark  to 
a  friend  :  "  The  popular  idea  of  Roman  Catholics  as  Jesuitical 
and  untruthful  is  contrary  to  my  own  experience.  The  most 
truthful  man  I  ever  met  was  an  Ultramontane.  He  was 
grotesquely  truthful."  Tennyson  would  sometimes  retort  in 
kind  to  my  father's  frank  criticisms,  and  once,  after  vainly 
trying  to  decipher  one  of  his  letters,  observed  that  the  hand- 
writing was  "  like  walking-sticks  gone  mad,"  a  curiously  true 
description  of  my  father's  very  peculiar  characters.1  .  .  . 

As  with  scenery,  so  with  poetry  ;  my  father  only  took  in 
broad  effects  and  simple  pathos,  and  would  single  out  for 
special  admiration  such  a  poem  as  the  Children's  Hospital 
over  which  he  shed  many  tears. 

Tennyson  soon  accustomed  himself  to  my  father's  indiffer- 
ence to  his  poetry  in  general.  But  he  hoped  that,  at  all  events, 
his  metaphysical  poems  would  interest  his  neighbour,  and  sent 
him  the  MS.  of  De  Profundis  when  he  wrote  it ;  but  the 
reply  was  only  an  entreaty  that  he  would  put  explanatory 
notes  to  it  when  it  should  be  published.  One  exception, 
1  My  own  writing  he  compared  to  the  "  limbs  of  a  flea." 


266  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

however,  must  be  made  in  favour  of  Becket  which  Tenny- 
son read  aloud  to  Ward,  who,  greatly  to  his  own  surprise, 
admired  it  enthusiastically.  "  How  do  you  like  it  ? "  Tennyson 
asked,  and  the  reply  was,  "Very  much,  though  I  did  not 
expect  to  like  it  at  all.  It  was  quite  splendid.  The  develop- 
ment of  character  in  Chancellor  and  Archbishop  is  wonderfully 
drawn.     Where  did  you  learn  it  all  ?  * 

.  .  .  When  my  father  died  Tennyson  visited  his  grave  in 
company  with  Father  Haythornthwaite,  who  spoke  to  me  of 
the  visit  directly  afterwards.  A  cross  of  fresh  flowers  had 
been  placed  on  the  grave  until  the  monument  should  be 
erected.     Tennyson  quoted  Shirley's  couplet : 

Only  the  actions  of  the  just 

Smell  sweet,  and  blossom  in  the  dust. 

And  then,  standing  over  the  grave,  he  recited  the  whole  of 
the  beautiful  poem  from  which  these  lines  are  taken. 

A  few  years  later  Tennyson  published  the  memorial  lines 
in  the  volume  called  Demeter  and  other  Poems,  which  show 
how  closely  his  observant  mind  had  taken  in  the  character  of 
his  friend : 

Farewell,  whose  living  like  I  shall  not  find, 
Whose  Faith  and  Work  were  bells  of  full  accord, 

My  friend,  the  most  unworldly  of  mankind, 
Most  generous  of  all  Ultramontanes,  Ward. 

How  subtle  at  tierce  and  quart  of  mind  with  mind, 
How  loyal  in  the  following  of  thy  Lord  ! 

My  father  rarely  mixed  in  general  society  in 
Freshwater,  or  anywhere  else,  but  both  Mrs.  Cameron 
and  Tennyson  used  often  to  bring  their  friends  to  see 
us  at  Weston.  A  friend  has  lately  reminded  me  of 
one  occasion  on  which  we  acted  "  dumb  crambo,"  and 
the  word  to  be  guessed  was  to  rhyme  with  "tell." 
After  various  exhibitions  of  her  histrionic  genius, 
Mrs.  Cameron  reached  her  most  triumphant  height 
when  she  entered  the  room,  robed  in  a  flaming  red 


TENNYSON  AT  FRESHWATER  267 

cloak,  and  went  through  the  most  wonderful  gestures 
and  facial  contortions,  as  of  a  tortured  spirit,  bringing 
rounds  of  applause,  which  betokened  that  she  had 
discovered  the  word  to  be  guessed — namely  "  hell." 
She  was  devoted  to  my  father  and  used  in  her  very 
original  way  to  kiss  his  hand.  She  always  addressed 
him  as  "  Squire  Ward." 1 

When  Garibaldi  visited  Farringford,  Mrs.  Cameron 
was  naturally  among  those  most  eager  to  make 
acquaintance  with  one  who  loomed  so  large  in  the 
English  mind  at  that  time.  She  arrived  at  Farring- 
ford after  a  morning  spent  in  her  usual  occupation  of 
taking  photographs,  with  the  result  that  her  finger 
tips  were  deeply  stained.  She,  of  course,  wanted  to 
photograph  Garibaldi  himself.  Her  very  original  dress 
formed  such  a  contrast  to  that  of  other  ladies  to  whom 
Garibaldi  was  presented,  that  he  thought  this  strangely 
clad  and  apparently  dirty  woman  must  be  a  beggar. 
She  soon  understood  the  situation,  and  not  the  least 
abashed,  explained  to  him  insistently,  "  This  is  not 
dirt,  but  art." 

I  have  before  now  told  the  story  of  a  very  amusing 
meeting  of  hers  and  Tennyson's  with  one  belonging 
to  a  very  different  world  from  Garibaldi.  Cardinal 
Vaughan  (then  a  Bishop)  was  staying  with  my  father 
at  Weston,  and  Mrs.  Cameron  and  Tennyson  came  to 
tea  to  meet  him.  Mrs.  Cameron  was,  at  that  time, 
photographing  various  people  for  the  characters  in 
the  Idylls  of  the  King.  Directly  she  saw  Vaughan's 
knightly  face  and  figure,  she  called  out  to  Tennyson  : 
"Alfred,   I   have   found    Sir    Lancelot."      Tennyson, 

1  Mrs.  Warre  Cornish  writes  to  me,  "  Mrs.  Cameron  used  to  say 
your  father  was  such  a  great  man  that  she  ?mtst  call  him  by  a  special 
title." 


268  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

not  seeing  to  whom  she  referred,  replied  in  deep 
tones :  "  I  want  a  face  that  is  well  worn  with  evil 
passion."  The  Bishop  was  greatly  embarrassed, 
and  the  company  a  good  deal  amused.  But  the  two 
men  were  afterwards  introduced  to  each  other  and 
had  much  friendly  conversation. 

My  own  more  frequent  intercourse  with  Tennyson 
began  after  I  returned  from  Rome,  where  I  spent  a 
year  attending  the  philosophical  lectures  at  the 
Gregorian  University  in  1878.  While  in  Rome  I 
read  TJie  Holy  Grail  very  carefully,  and  had  some 
correspondence  about  it  with  Tennyson's  eldest  son. 
When  I  returned  to  England  I  at  once  saw  a  good 
deal  of  the  poet,  and  stayed  with  him,  I  think,  every 
year  at  Aldworth  until  his  death.  I  have  elsewhere 
recorded  various  notes  I  made  at  different  times  of 
my  conversations  with  him.  I  may  say  a  word  here 
as  to  the  general  character  of  his  talk. 

Tennyson's  conversation  was  at  its  best  out 
walking,  and  his  morning  walk  was  an  event  to 
which  his  friends  always  keenly  looked  forward.  To 
one  who  had  never  met  him  it  presented  some 
surprises.  When  one  first  heard  him  speak  one  was 
startled  by  the  strong  Lincolnshire  accent,  which  I 
fancy  he  deliberately  cultivated.  Huxley  once  said 
to  me,  "  One  thought  it  was  his  own  Northern  farmer." 
It  took  a  little  reflection  on  the  actual  words  to  observe 
the  great  beauty  of  his  language.  It  was  wonderfully 
simple,  terse  and  clean  cut,  the  words  being,  by  pre- 
ference, short  and  Saxon.  His  letters,  so  many  of 
which  are  printed  in  his  biography,  give  in  this 
respect  a  very  true  idea  of  his  conversation.  He  was 
a  very  good  listener,  and  not  in  the  least  inclined  to 
monopolize  the  conversation.     He  would  find  at  once 


TENNYSON  AT  FRESHWATER  269 

the  subject  on  which  his  companion  had  first-hand 
information,  and  he  would  be  eager  to  learn  all  he 
could.  He  had  a  real  passion  for  facts,  and,  in  the 
best  sense,  la  grande  curiosite.  His  memory  for 
details  which  he  learnt,  either  in  reading  or  in  con- 
versation, was  most  retentive,  and  I  remember  being 
amazed  at  the  array  of  exact  figures  he  presented  to 
me  one  day  after  he  had  been  reading  Ball's  Astro- 
nomy, as  to  the  distances  of  planets,  the  rate  of  their 
movement,  and  so  forth.  He  also  knew  a  great  deal 
about  botany  and  natural  history.  But,  indeed,  his 
passion  for  general  knowledge  (as  I  have  already 
intimated)  struck  one  more  than  anything  in  talking 
to  him.  There  was  no  rash  theorizing  or  generaliza- 
tion ;  he  had  the  true  nineteenth-century  instinct  for 
amassing  details  before  he  would  proceed  to  an 
induction.  He  liked,  too,  where  he  could,  to  see 
things  for  himself,  and  within  a  year  of  his  death  I 
remember  his  suddenly  exclaiming,  "  I  want  to  go 
abroad  and  see  the  world." 

Our  national  defences  interested  him  very  much. 
About  the  year  1888  Mr.  Stanhope,  the  Minister  for 
War,  came  to  Freshwater  to  inspect  the  first  trial  of 
Brennan's  torpedo.  A  huge  hulk,  attached  by  a  very 
long  rope  to  a  small  steamer,  was  dragged  between 
Col  well  Bay  and  Hurst  Castle,  and  the  torpedo  was 
to  blow  it  up.  A  good  many  of  us  assembled  to 
witness  the  experiment.  I  stood  next  to  Tenny- 
son, and  on  this  occasion  his  silence  of  attention 
was  more  eloquent  than  speech.  We  saw  the  hulk 
dragged  slowly  along  about  300  yards  from  the  shore, 
and  when  it  got  near  the  appointed  spot,  quite 
suddenly,  the  torpedo  started  on  its  way  from  the 
shore,  making  for  a  point  just  in  front  of  the  hulk.     Its 


270  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

course  was  shown  by  the  flag  attached  to  it,  which  was 
visible.  As  the  flag  darted  rapidly  onwards,  jerking  up 
and  down,  it  had  the  appearance  of  something  living. 
"It  is  like  an  evil  spirit  bent  on  destruction,"  Tenny- 
son remarked.  At  last  it  suddenly  disappeared,  and 
a  few  moments  later  there  was  a  huge  cloud  of  smoke. 
When  it  was  dissipated  the  hulk  had  vanished — 
blown  to  pieces.  For  some  minutes  Tennyson  did 
not  speak.  He  afterwards  kept  dwelling  on  what  he 
had  seen  and  several  times  recurred  to  the  idea  which 
had  impressed  itself  on  his  imagination,  that  this 
engine  of  destruction,  elaborated  by  nineteenth-century 
science,  reminded  him  of  the  primitive  conception  of 
a  malignant  evil  spirit. 

Tennyson  was,  like  many  men  of  genius,  moody. 
He  was  intensely  highly  strung,  and  when  working 
at  a  poem  was  not  the  genial  companion  he  was  on 
other  occasions.     He  could  be  abrupt  and  even  rude. 
I  have  known  him  at  such  times  unconsciously  rude 
to  strangers,  and  then  make  most  gracious  and  kindly 
compensation  when  reproached  for  it,  perhaps  giving 
the  person  whose  feelings  he  had  hurt  a  copy  of  his 
poems  with  an  autograph  inscription.     He  had  also 
the  abruptness  of  great  truthfulness.     "He  will  say 
the  thing  that  is  in  his  mind,"  as  Lady  Tennyson  once 
happily  put  it.     There  was  in  him  (as  I  have  said)  a 
vein  of  childlike  simplicity,  and  if  the  admiration  of 
others  sometimes  made  him  appear  self-conscious  that 
was  the  cause.     He  was  aware  of  it,  and  had  not  the 
sophistication  of  the  man   of  the  world,  who  would 
have  pretended  not  to   see   it.     He   was   extremely 
frank  and  simple  in  asking  one's  opinion  on  any  poem 
he  might  be  writing.     Even  when  I  was  little  more 
than    a    boy  I   remember    his    reading    Vastness   to 


TENNYSON  AT  FRESHWATER  271 

Mr.  Frederick  Locker l  and  myself  at  Aldworth  before 
it  appeared  in  Macmillaris  Magazine.  In  the  course 
of  the  noble  couplets  in  which  he  presents  the  insoluble 
mystery  of  the  universe  and  of  human  life  he  read 
one  in  which,  as  occasionally  happened  to  him,  his 
sense  of  form  had  for  a  moment  failed  him.  It  ran  as 
follows : 

Love  for  the  maiden  crowned  with  marriage, 

No  regret  for  aught  that  has  been  ; 
Debtless  competence,  comely  children, 

Happy  household,  sober  and  clean. 

Mr.  Locker  and  I  both  smiled  very  visibly,  and 
Tennyson  asked,  "  What  are  you  laughing  at  ?  "  We 
were  somewhat  confused,  but  I  ventured  to  say, 
"  Perhaps,  if  it  makes  us  laugh,  it  will  make  other 
people  laugh."  Tennyson  said,  "  That's  true."  He 
folded  up  his  MS.  and  read  no  more.  Next  morning 
after  breakfast  he  said  to  us,  "I  want  to  read  you 
something,"  and  read  the  lines  as  they  stand  in  the 
published  version  : 

Love  for  the  maiden  crowned  with  marriage, 

No  regret  for  aught  that  has  been ; 
Household  happiness,  gracious  children, 

Debtless  competence,  golden  mean. 

He  used  in  the  'eighties  very  often  to  read  me  his 
poetry,  and  I  was  among  those  who  delighted  in  the 
solemn  chant  with  which  he  rolled  out  his  lines.  I 
used  to  attempt  to  imitate  it  in  reading  his  poems  to 
intimate  friends,  and  I  endeavoured  to  make  the 
imitation  complete  and  to  catch  his  somewhat  pro- 
vincial accent.  "Some  d — d  good-natured  friend" 
tried  to  make  mischief  in  consequence,  as  I  discovered. 

1  The  author  of  London  Lyrics^  afterwards  Mr.  Locker- Lampson. 


272  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

I  went  to  lunch  at  Farringford  one  day.  More  often 
than  not  Tennyson  used  to  let  me  sit  next  him,  and 
talked  to  me  a  good  deal.  On  this  occasion  he  came 
in  late,  and  went  at  once  to  the  other  end  of  the  table. 
I  addressed  one  or  two  remarks  to  him,  but  he  made 
no  reply,  and  I  saw  him  several  times  looking  at  me 
with  a  severe  expression  which  I  could  not  quite 
understand.  Suddenly,  during  a  pause  in  the  conver- 
sation, he  said,  in  his  deep  tones,  "  Wilfrid  Ward, 
I'm  told  you  mimic  me!"  It  was  rather  a  terrible 
moment,  but  I  replied,  "  I  think  if  any  one  has  heard 
you  read  your  poetry,  the  best  thing  they  can  do  is 
to  try  and  read  it  like  you."  "  That's  very  true,"  he 
answered,  with  conviction,  and  the  strain  in  our 
relations  at  once  came  to  an  end. 

He  was  perfectly  conscious  of  all  that  he  added  to 
the  effect  of  a  poem  by  reading  it  himself,  and  I 
remember  on  one  occasion  his  reading  to  Sir  Richard 
J  ebb  and  myself  Come  into  the  garden,  Maud,  working 
up  the  passion  of  the  concluding  stanzas  with  extra- 
ordinary power,  each  line  in  a  higher  key  than  the 
one  before  it,  and  then  his  voice  falling  suddenly  with 
the  last  words  : 

Would  start  and  tremble  under  her  feet, 
And  blossom  in  purple  red. 

He  added,  as  the  tears  stood  in  his  eyes  and  his  voice 
trembled  with  emotion,  "  No  one  knows  what  Maud 
is  till  they  have  heard  me  read  it."  And  it  was 
perfectly  true. 


VIII 

CARDINAL   NEWMAN'S 
SENSITIVENESS 

There  is  one  feature  in  the  temperament  of  Cardinal 
Newman  which  is  very  obvious  to  a  reader  of  his  corre- 
spondence, and  somewhat  exceptional.  I  refer  to  his 
extraordinarily  sensitive  nature,  with  certain  defects 
of  temper  which  were  allied  with  it.  His  biographer 
was  naturally  somewhat  anxious  as  to  the  result  of 
publishing  in  his  written  life,  as  he  has  done  quite 
frankly,  documents  in  which  this  side  of  his  nature  is 
apparent.  With  hardly  an  exception,  however,  the 
critics  of  the  Biography  treated  such  symptoms  with 
reverence,  glancing  only  slightly  at  the  defects  of 
great  qualities  in  a  man  of  genius.  And  if  its 
author  desires  now  to  offer  a  few  words  of  explana- 
tion, it  is  quite  as  much  in  reply  to  the  objections 
he  himself  felt  at  the  outset  to  making  public  some 
documents  which  were  specially  intimate  and  personal, 
as  in  consequence  of  anything  said  by  others. 

It  has  been  generally  recognized  that  the  somewhat 
exacting  demands  of  modern  biography  may  have 
called  for  revelations  which  would  not  formerly 
have  been  deemed  necessary.  That  such  demands 
are  to  be  reckoned  with  I  do  not  deny.  The  reserve 
of  an  earlier  generation  would  not  now  be  tolerated. 

T 


274  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

But  there  were  in  Cardinal  Newman's  case  strong 
additional  reasons  which  made  a  frank  and  full 
delineation  of  his  personality  an  absolute  necessity,  if 
his  biography  was  to  be  written  at  all.  A  selection  of 
letters,  full  of  wise  counsel  and  conveying  to  the 
reader  that  sweet  gravity  and  mellow  wisdom  which 
personal  intercourse  with  the  great  Oratorian  con- 
veyed, might  indeed  have  been  published,  leaving 
untouched  the  aspect  above  referred  to  ; — but  not  a 
biography.  It  is  not  merely  that  any  biography  must 
depict  the  personality  of  its  subject,  but  in  Newman's 
case  the  personality  affects  features  of  the  life-story 
which  are  in  many  cases  not  directly  connected  with  it. 
Even  in  describing  Newman's  views  and  mental  outlook 
and  the  actual  events  of  his  career,  the  sensitive  person- 
ality of  the  man  must  be  studied  intimately  in  order  to 
give  a  true  and  intelligible  account.  Individual  letters 
do  not  always  convey  his  views  truly.  The  mood  and 
the  circumstances,  both  of  the  writer  and  of  the 
recipient  of  a  letter,  are  necessary  factors  in  its  inter- 
pretation. Never  was  a  man  in  whose  nature  the 
different  elements  were  more  closely  knit  together. 
The  expression  of  his  views  in  private  letters  often 
needs  the  personal  equation  for  its  translation  into 
the  real  equivalents  of  the  views  themselves ;  and 
these  views,  even  when  printed  for  all  to  read,  are  still 
impregnated  with  the  writer's  personality. 

Let  us  consider  this  last  point  first — the  personal 
element  in  relation  to  his  speculative  views  even  in 
their  published  expression.  The  intellectual  side  of  a 
man's  mentality  may  often — as  in  the  case  of  some  of 
the  great  schoolmen — be  almost  completely  separated 
from  his  spiritual  side  and  from  his  literary  or  poetic 
gifts.     St.  Thomas  Aquinas  was  the   author  of  the 


CARDINAL  NEWMAN'S  SENSITIVENESS  275 

Lauda  Siont  and  of  the  beautiful  office  in  the  breviary 
for  the  Feast  of  Corpus  Christi.  But  the  poetry  and 
spiritual  exultation  which  are  so  apparent  in  these 
writings  are  quite  absent  from  the  dry  statements  of 
the  arguments  against  each  thesis  given  in  his  Summa 
Theologize  under  the  well-known  formula  videtur 
quod,  or  the  luminous  and  dispassionate  replies  of 
the  respondeo  dicendum.  With  Newman  it  was 
otherwise.  The  personal  touch  on  the  mind  of  his 
readers,  which  makes  them  aware  of  the  prophet,  the 
poet  and  man  of  letters  in  the  philosopher,  is  never 
absent.  The  subtlest  essays  he  ever  wrote  on  the 
difficulties  which  the  rationalistic  movement  of  the 
day  presents  against  faith  in  the  supernatural  took  the 
form  of  sermons  "on  the  theory  of  religious  belief" 
preached  before  the  University  of  Oxford.  They 
have  none  of  the  dry,  objective,  impersonal  character  of 
the  arguments  of  Aquinas.  They  are  masterpieces  of 
literary  style  and  they  contain  arresting  images  which 
speak  as  much  of  the  poet  as  of  the  philosopher. 
Newman's  own  personality  and  spiritual  perceptions 
hold  a  large  place  in  these  discourses.  His  own 
consciousness  of  this  fact  is  suggested  by  the  very 
title  of  one  of  the  most  striking  of  their  number  on 
"  Personal  influence  as  a  means  of  propagating  religious 
truth."  In  another  of  these  sermons,  "  Love  the  safe- 
guard of  Faith  against  Superstition,"  we  have  again 
the  personal  note  introduced  into  an  intellectual 
argument.  The  theory  of  "  implicit  reasoning,"  which 
is  the  keynote  of  these  sermons,  is  avowedly  the 
delineation  of  the  action  of  a  sensitive  personality, 
with  profoundly  religious  aims,  directed  and  informed 
by  the  conscience,  in  reaching  and  holding  to  religious 
truth.     And  this  theory  was  later  on  developed  at  a 


276  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

great  length  in  the  Grammar  of  Assent  in  its 
account  of  the  "  illative  sense."  The  account  is  based 
on  the  writer's  analysis  of  his  own  spontaneous 
reasoning.  Here  we  have  at  once,  in  a  sphere  which 
seems  at  first  sight  concerned  more  than  any  other 
with  dry  intellect,  the  presence  in  action  of  the  whole 
man  who  was  at  once  prophet,  poet  and  artist 

Once  more,  to  speak  still  of  this  directly  intellectual 
sphere  of  his  work,  Newman's  peculiar  personality 
breaks  down  the  common  contrast  between  the  often 
adventurous  representative  of  intellectual  interests 
and  the  cautious  protector  of  spiritual  interests.  We 
are  accustomed,  in  reading  of  the  controversies  of  the 
'sixties,  to  think  of  Dollinger  and  the  Munich  School, 
of  Lord  Acton  and  his  friends  in  England,  as  the  great 
upholders  of  the  interests  of  historical  scholarship,  of 
science,  of  philosophical  thought  within  the  Church. 
The  Pastors  of  the  Catholic  people  stand  forth  in 
contrast  as  full  of  tender  consideration  for  the  souls  of 
men.  Not  by  intellect  alone  they  urge  does  the 
Christian  people  thrive.  Why  should  men  be  scared 
and  their  faith  shaken  by  the  discussion  of  perplex- 
ing problems  ;  why  should  their  pious  meditations 
be  disturbed  and  the  simplicity  of  their  tradi- 
tionary ways  of  thought  be  invaded  ?  The  point  of 
view  of  the  Pastor  of  the  flock  is  thus  popularly 
opposed  to  that  of  the  scholar  or  thinker.  But  in 
Newman  the  two  standpoints  were  united.  It  was 
precisely  his  tender  consideration  for  the  souls  of  men 
deeply  desirous  to  hold  the  Christian  faith  and  yet 
keenly  alive  to  the  difficulties  which  were  familiar 
to  thinking  minds  among  his  contemporaries,  which 
prompted  him  in  his  most  intellectual  essays.  His 
philosophy  of  faith  never  took  the  form  of  a  dry-as-dust 


CARDINAL   NEWMAN'S  SENSITIVENESS  277 

disquisition.  It  was  a  directly  pastoral  work.  He 
could  not  admit  that  only  the  ignorant  and  the 
simple  needed  tender  consideration  for  their  spiritual 
interests.  Such  consideration  was  needed  also  by  the 
men  of  thought  and  the  men  of  learning  to  whom 
religious  faith  was  as  deep  a  need  as  it  was  to  the 
simple.  And  in  a  sense  their  needs  were  the  more 
important — for  they  were  pioneers,  and  represented 
the  necessities  of  the  future.  Thus  it  is  impossible  to 
deal  with  Newman's  written  words  even  on  philosophy 
or  on  history,  in  their  bearing  on  revealed  religion, 
apart  from  the  profoundly  personal  view  of  the  situa- 
tion which  inspired  them.  That  view  likewise  limited 
their  scope.  What  hasty  critics  have  sometimes  set 
down  as  his  intellectual  limitations  were  often  the 
limitations  imposed  by  the  law  of  charity.  For  he 
would  not  go  beyond  the  practical  need  of  those 
whom  he  strove  to  help,  for  the  sake  of  satisfying 
an  intellectual  curiosity  which  was  not  really  urgent. 

We  find  in  this  predominance  of  the  personal 
element  the  source  of  his  strength  and  of  his  weakness 
in  some  of  the  actual  theories  he  set  forth.  Cor  ad 
cor  loquitur  was  the  motto  he  chose  as  a  Cardinal,  and 
his  choice  betrayed  a  true  perception  of  his  own 
genius.  That  a  finely  wrought  and  sensitive  nature 
could  convey  to  other  like  natures  far  more  than  could 
be  put  adequately  into  words  was  a  fact  on  which  he 
constantly  insisted.  Logical  formulae  are  a  very 
inadequate  record  of  the  reasoning  of  the  human 
mind.  The  whole  man  reasons  ; — his  affections  and 
his  imagination,  and  his  conscience,  and  his  actual 
experience  playing  their  part  as  well  as  logical  powers. 
Other  faculties  supply  the  material  for  logic  to  work  on. 
No  one  ever  conveyed  this  great  truth  more  cogently 


278  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

than  Newman.  The  great  General  who  rapidly  takes 
in  a  strategical  situation,  foresees  the  movements  of 
the  enemy  and  anticipates  them  in  his  action,  and 
chooses  the  psychological  moment  for  a  great  counter 
move,  is  guided  by  faculties  far  more  subtle  and  more 
multiform  than  formal  logic  can  keep  pace  with  or 
adequately  compass.  So  too  with  the  man  of  insight 
in  other  departments  of  action.  In  some  measure 
the  reasoning  of  such  men  is  typical  of  the  reasoning 
of  all  thoughtful  minds  in  the  urgent  affairs  of  life. 
The  "  illative  sense  "  is  the  phrase  Newman  used  for 
that  subtle  power  of  the  mind  to  take  in  and  appraise 
the  significance  of  relevant  considerations.  It  sums 
up  the  complex  of  faculties  utilized.  Most  men  have 
this  power  in  their  measure,  and  he  shows  clearly  that, 
much  as  men  may  differ  in  their  capacity,  every  one 
has  a  power  of  reasoning  far  deeper  and  wider  in  its 
reach  than  is  represented  by  the  logic  he  has  at  his 
command.  Informal  reasoning  includes  many  premises 
which  elude  the  logical  analyst.  This  fact  is  often 
a  valuable  refutation  of  the  criticisms  of  the  acute 
logician  on  convictions  which  really  rest  on  grounds 
much  more  profound — though  they  may  be  unex- 
pressed— than  those  of  which  the  critic  takes  account. 
Yet,  on  the  other  hand,  the  theory  has  its  weakness 
as  well  as  its  strength.  If  imagination  and  affection 
stretch  out  tentacles  far  beyond  the  reach  of  the  logical 
formula,  and  seize  instinctively  on  many  profound 
truths,  they  may  also,  at  times,  lead  the  mind  astray. 
In  the  hands  of  genius  their  action  may  be  almost 
unerring.  But  not  so  with  ordinary  men.  Yet  that 
action  passes  to  a  region  in  which  adequate  verifica- 
tion is  impossible.  Newman's  theory,  though  pro- 
found and  largely  new,  was  incomplete. 


CARDINAL  NEWMAN'S  SENSITIVENESS  279 

It  was  probably  Newman's  own  extraordinarily- 
acute  perceptions  which  made  him  press  the  theory 
beyond  the  point  at  which  it  holds  for  ordinary  men  ; 
and  we  have  in  this  abnormal  acuteness  of  perception 
in  most  various  departments  a  chief  characteristic  of 
the  man,  and  the  root  of  that  "  sensitiveness  "  which 
is  named  at  the  head  of  this  Essay.  His  taste  for 
wine  was  so  delicate,  though  he  drank  sparingly, 
that  he  chose  the  wines  for  the  Oriel  cellars.  His 
musical  ear  was  keen,  and  music  such  an  intense 
delight  to  him  that  when  he  played  Beethoven's 
quartets  on  the  violin,  after  an  interval  of  some  twelve 
years,  he  broke  down  and  sobbed  aloud,  unable  to  go 
on.  His  sensitiveness  to  smell  is  apparent  in  a  well- 
known  passage  in  Loss  and  Gain. 

This  extraordinary  physical  sensitiveness  was  the 
counterpart  to  his  sensitive  intellectual  perceptions 
(if  the  phrase  may  be  allowed),  and  to  his  spiritual 
perceptions.  In  this  latter  sphere  his  sensitiveness 
gave  an  insight  which,  to  the  believer,  was  almost 
miraculously  true  ;  yet  to  the  unbeliever  his  "  in- 
tuitions "  appeared  to  be  the  suggestions  of  a  morbid 
fancy.  Here  was  a  peculiarity  which  caused  one  of 
his  deepest  personal  trials,  and  one  which  occupied 
a  significant  place  in  his  history.  He  saw  with 
almost  a  prophet's  eye  the  issue  of  trains  of  thought 
which  were  leading  men  unconsciously  to  a  denial  of 
Christian  faith  and  even  of  a  belief  in  God.  Yet  the 
hold  of  his  spiritual  nature  on  the  Unseen  World  was 
so  close  that  while  he  keenly  realized  the  reasonings 
which  were  affecting  men  so  strongly  in  the  direction 
of  unbelief,  they  had  no  such  effect  on  himself.  He 
was  thus  in  a  sense  isolated  intellectually  from  both 
parties — from   the   believers    and    unbelievers   alike. 


28o  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

He  realized  the  mind  of  an  Agnostic  and  the  force 
of  the  reasons  which  affected  it  to  a  degree  which 
alienated  the  sympathy  of  the  orthodox  who  could  not 
tolerate  the  notion  that  unfaith  was  so  plausible.  Yet 
his  profound  conviction  of  supernatural  truth  made 
him  completely  out  of  sympathy  with  the  unbelievers 
with  whose  thoughts  he  was,  nevertheless,  in  closest  and 
most  understanding  touch.  These  deepest  problems 
of  his  life  had,  therefore,  to  be  dealt  with  in  almost 
total  isolation.  He  seemed  to  one  side  to  give  away 
too  much,  and  to  the  other  to  be  withheld  by  what 
was  in  their  eyes  mere  sentiment,  from  conceding 
enough.  The  charge  against  him  was  the  inevitable 
one  where  incommunicable  personality  plays  so  large 
a  part.  For  there  can  be  no  adequate  external  test 
of  the  validity  of  its  conclusions.  The  question  will 
ever  arise,  Is  this  or  that  conviction  due  to  the  insight 
of  genius  or  to  the  aberration  of  a  highly  imaginative 
mind  ?  That  charge  was  answered  against  him  in 
many  instances  by  both  camps.  The  unbelievers  saw 
in  him  a  superstitious  mind  which  they  found  it  hard 
to  reconcile  with  unquestionable  symptoms  of  intel- 
lectual insight  and  depth.  The  average  Christian 
theologian  regarded  his  admissions  as  to  the  force  of 
agnostic  reasoning  and  the  melancholy  anticipations 
of  the  growth  of  the  infidel  movement  in  the  world  of 
thought,  as  the  suggestions  of  a  morbid  fancy,  or  as 
signs  of  a  dangerous  tendency  to  religious  liberalism. 

It  would  be  easy  to  show  that  what  I  have  said 
above,  in  regard  to  the  part  played  by  a  sensitive 
and  unique  personality  in  Newman's  treatment  of  the 
Philosophy  of  Faith,  has  its  parallel  in  other  fields  of 
thought. 

But  if  his   sensitive  personality  enters  generally 


CARDINAL   NEWMAN'S  SENSITIVENESS  281 

into  his  intellectual  views,  its  place  is  yet  more 
prominent  and  its  quality  more  precise  in  the  story 
of  the  events  of  his  career.  It  was  the  source  at 
once  of  his  great  achievement  and  of  his  failures,  of 
his  greatest  joys  in  life  and  his  greatest  suffering. 
It  was  the  personal  magnetism  due  to  his  highly- 
wrought  nature  and  delicate  perceptions  which  was 
in  great  part  the  secret  of  his  power  at  Oxford — a 
magnetism  felt  in  daily  intercourse,  which  is  often 
quite  absent  in  those  whose  power  is  publicly  exer- 
cised, as  Newman's  was,  from  the  pulpit.  It  needs 
a  close  analysis  of  his  personality  to  understand  the 
gift  which  enabled  him  to  love  each  friend  almost  as 
though  he  were  the  only  one.  This  issued  in  the 
almost  unparalleled  sentiment  of  loyalty  which  was 
formulated  by  members  of  the  Oxford  School  as 
Credo  in  Newmannum.  But  Newman's  faculty  of 
deep  personal  love,  and  of  winning  devoted  loyalty 
cannot  be  truly  represented  by  giving  only  one  side 
of  its  manifestations.  Gratitude  for  loyalty  went  with 
resentment  where  loyalty  was  broken  ;  yearning  love 
for  those  who  were  "  faithful  and  true "  went  with 
a  certain  slowness  to  forgive  what  appeared  to  him 
to  be  personal  unfaithfulness.  Again  the  years  passed 
as  a  spiritual  leader  among  the  men  to  whom  he  was 
at  the  same  time  a  most  intimate  and  familiar  personal 
friend,  years  in  which,  as  Mr.  Froude  has  told  us,  his 
every  word  was  treasured  as  an  "intellectual  diamond," 
inevitably  made  the  fact  of  his  leadership  almost  like 
a  part  of  the  course  of  nature.  If  he  seemed  and  was 
to  some  extent  self-centred  in  the  times  that  followed, 
that  was  the  direct  consequence  of  a  state  of  things  of 
long  standing,  of  an  acknowledged  fact  in  the  society  in 
which  he  so  long  lived,  to  ignore  which  would  have  been 


282  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

profoundly  unreal.  No  doubt  from  first  to  last  those 
outside  the  group  which  felt  the  spell  of  the  magician 
had  something  of  a  sneer  both  for  the  worship  of  his 
followers  and  for  the  leadership  inevitably  conscious 
of  its  own  power.  That  sneer  naturally  reappears  in 
some  quarters  now  that  the  story  has  been  fully 
told.  But  it  represents  the  view  of  an  outsider.  Any- 
how, the  position  of  which  I  speak,  with  the  personal 
qualities  it  involved,  is  an  essential  part  of  the  life  of 
the  man. 

But  then  again  while  his  sensitiveness  was  thus 
bound  up  with  his  triumphs  it  was  also  an  essential 
part  of  the  discipline  of  trial  under  which  he  suf- 
fered for  so  many  years  after  he  joined  the  Catholic 
Church.  His  sensitiveness  was  the  medium  of 
purgative  trial  and  the  test  of  his  resolute  sanctity. 
He  trod  the  path  of  duty  at  a  cost  not  known  to 
rougher  natures ;  and  persons  who  remember  those 
days  tell  us  that,  profoundly  though  he  suffered,  he 
was  in  speech  quite  uncomplaining  at  the  successive 
events  which  seemed  to  thwart  all  the  aims  he  most 
cared  for  in  life.  Bishop  Ullathorne  once  wrote  that 
he  appeared  to  be  living  under  "  a  dispensation  of 
mortification,"  but  one  who  was  a  severe  critic  of 
Newman's,  and  long  lived  with  him,  said  to  the 
present  writer  that  if  Newman  had  a  special  claim 
to  be  accounted  a  saint  it  was  the  uncomplaining 
resignation  with  which  he  took  successive  and  crush- 
ing disappointments  which  appeared  to  destroy  the 
usefulness  of  his  life.  If  the  biographer  has  now  let 
the  world  know,  in  the  words  written  to  intimate 
friends,  something  of  what  he  suffered,  it  has  been 
necessary  in  order  that  the  full  degree  of  chastening 
trial  should  be  understood.     But  the  reader  must  not 


CARDINAL  NEWMAN'S  SENSITIVENESS  283 

forget  that  such  complaints  were  comparatively  few 
and  private.  Before  the  world  at  large  he  was  silent 
and  resigned.  The  extraordinary  sensitiveness  of  his 
nature  and  his  keen  realization  of  his  mission  in  life 
as  a  leader  of  men  must  be  borne  in  mind  that  the 
story  of  these  trials  may  be  understood  in  its  real 
significance.  It  was  a  nature  which  suffered  tenfold 
from  its  own  exceptional  capacity  of  suffering. 

Moreover,  this  temperament,  so  unlike  that  of  a 
man  of  action,  was  partly  responsible  for  some  failures 
which  reacted  on  it  and  further  intensified  its  suffer- 
ing. And  if  the  story  of  the  treatment  he  experi- 
enced at  the  hands  of  Dr.  Cullen,  Cardinal  Wiseman 
and  others,  were  told  without  even  a  minute  descrip- 
tion of  the  temperament  of  the  hero  of  the  tale,  and 
of  its  share  in  causing  the  events  which  tried  him 
so  much,  his  opponents  might  seem  to  be  almost 
monsters  in  human  form.  The  difficulties  with  Dr. 
Cullen,  the  story  of  the  offered  bishopric  and  its  with- 
drawal, the  translation  of  the  Bible  and  its  abandon- 
ment, the  scheme  for  an  Oratory  at  Oxford,  and  the 
secret  instruction  from  Propaganda  against  Newman's 
own  residence  in  the  university  city,  —  all  these 
events,  if  set  down  without  a  most  careful  analysis  of 
the  part  played  in  them  by  Newman's  sensitive 
nature,  would  involve  the  gravest  charges  against 
eminent  and  good  men.  In  every  case  a  certain 
want  in  Newman  of  the  rough  fibre  and  insistence  of 
a  successful  man  of  action  or  a  man  of  the  world 
played  a  part  in  his  failure.  We  may  feel,  indeed, 
that  he  was  very  hardly  used,  but  we  see  also  the 
point  of  view  of  those  who  ministered  to  his  failure, 
and  trace,  in  part  at  least,  to  circumstances  and  to 
Newman's  own  nature  what  was  certainly  something  of 


284  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

a  tragedy.  The  offer  of  the  bishopric  was  clearly  due 
in  the  first  instance  to  the  impulsive  action  of  Cardinal 
Wiseman,  who  ought  not  to  have  made  the  sugges- 
tion without  the  full  and  deliberate  concurrence  of  the 
Irish  Episcopate.  When,  however,  Newman's  eleva- 
tion had  been  publicly  promised  and  announced,  a 
man  of  the  world  in  Newman's  position  would  unques- 
tionably have  declined  to  proceed  in  his  work  unless 
the  indignity  done  to  him  by  its  subsequent  withdrawal 
were  cancelled.  In  the  whole  Oxford  scheme  a  more 
practical  man  would  have  seen  the  hopelessness  of 
taking  a  line  which  militated  in  effect  strongly  against 
the  avowed  policy  of  Rome  and  of  the  English  hier- 
archy against  "  mixed  education."  An  understanding 
with  Dr.  Manning  was,  as  Cardinal  di  Luca  pointed  out 
to  Newman's  friends,  when  they  pleaded  his  cause  in 
Rome,  an  essential  preliminary.  In  both  cases  New- 
man was  unquestionably  very  hardly  treated,  but  pro- 
bably in  neither  would  events  have  turned  out  quite 
as  they  did  had  he  had  the  gifts  of  a  man  of  action, 
and  had  he  not  been  handicapped  by  that  peculiar 
sensitiveness  to  which  he  owed  so  much  of  his  joy  as 
of  his  suffering.  Again,  in  the  projected  translation 
of  the  Bible,  had  he  possessed  something  of  Arch- 
bishop Kenrick's  sang  froid  we  should  now  have  had 
our  new  version  of  the  Bible  as  the  Americans  have 
theirs.  But  resentment  at  the  inconsiderate  action  of 
Cardinal  Wiseman  (who  was,  however,  as  we  know 
from  other  sources,  ill  and  preoccupied),  and  the 
inaction  which,  in  Newman's  case,  was  not  inconsistent 
with  resentment, — nay,  was  often  caused  by  resent- 
ment— put  an  end  to  the  whole  project.  Here  again, 
as  in  the  case  of  the  bishopric,  the  sensitive  nature 
suffered   profoundly   but   made   no   sign.     All   these 


CARDINAL  NEWMAN'S  SENSITIVENESS  285 

years  afterwards  we  know  what  he  went  through,  but 
at  the  time  he  was  silent.  Had  he  then  and  there 
vehemently  protested,  in  all  probability  the  grievances 
would  have  been  removed. 

But  it  may  be  said — granted  that  the  personal  ele- 
ment must,  for  the  reasons  above  indicated,  be  dwelt  on 
to  a  considerable  extent,  there  remains  the  question  of 
degree.  Could  not  Newman's  sensitiveness  have  been 
indicated  in  general  terms,  and  intimate  documents 
written  with  no  thought  of  publication  have  been 
omitted  ?  The  reply  is  that  the  man's  nature  was  so 
complex  and  so  subtle  that  the  biographer  dared  not 
trust  to  such  a  summary.  A  subjective  estimate  must 
always  be  open  to  dispute.  The  documents  must  speak 
for  themselves,  for  in  some  places  they  appear  to 
present  almost  insoluble  contradictions.  An  account 
could  have  been  written  of  the  Oxford  scheme  of  1865, 
illustrated  by  authentic  documents,  which  would  have 
given  the  impression  that  Newman  never  wished  to 
go  to  Oxford,  and  was  simply  relieved  when  his  mis- 
sion thither  was  abandoned.  Another  account  could 
have  been  written  showing  him  almost  broken-hearted 
when  that  mission  was  prevented.  Letters  could  be 
given  in  which  he  seems  to  think  that  the  authorities 
had  on  grounds  of  consistency  and  common-sense  no 
choice  but  to  put  an  end  to  the  scheme ;  and  other 
letters  in  which  their  action  is  severely  criticized.  He 
might  be  represented  by  selected  letters  as  distressed 
and  annoyed  beyond  measure  at  having  to  help  in  the 
conduct  of  the  Rambler  and  as  out  of  sympathy  with 
its  conductors.  He  might  have  been  represented  by 
other  letters  as  considering  it  the  most  important 
work  within  his  reach,  undertaken  in  conjunction  with 
men  with  whom  on  the  whole  he  keenly  sympathized. 


286  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

His  attitude  towards  the  Vatican  Council  appears  in 
the  letter  he  wrote  about  it  to  Dr.  Bloxam,  to  be  pre- 
dominantly one  of  joy  at  the  prospect.  In  other 
letters  we  see  his  dismay  at  the  tone  and  action  of 
some  of  its  chief  promoters.  To  analyze  the  exces- 
sively subtle  distinctions  which  reconcile  these  appa- 
rently opposite  accounts,  as  well  as  the  changes  of 
mood  and  phases  of  thought  which  further  explain 
apparent  contradictions,  would  be  a  difficult,  perhaps 
an  impossible,  task.  At  best  it  would  be  the  bio- 
grapher's personal  interpretation  open  to  vigorous 
criticism  from  those  who  habitually  choose  one  aspect 
or  another  of  Newman's  attitude  of  mind  as  represent- 
ing the  real  man.  Personally  I  think  that  a  profound 
consistency  of  view  is  apparent  under  all  the  subtle 
variations  of  mood  and  the  interaction  of  his  estimates 
of  different  aspects  of  each  case.  But  obviously  a 
field  of  endless  controversy  would  be  opened  up  by 
any  theory  on  the  subject — or  by  any  personal  esti- 
mate of  the  outcome.  Only  the  record  of  his  own 
self-revelations  at  different  times  and  to  different 
persons  could  possibly  meet  the  case  and  have  the 
necessary  quality  of  objective  fact.  The  publication 
of  documents  telling  only  this  way  or  only  that  way 
would  have  been  unfair.  It  is  one  of  those  cases  in 
which  the  situation  is  so  complex  and  subtle,  that 
nothing  but  the  truth  minutely  told  will  meet  the  case. 
The  result  of  substantial  suppression  would  have 
issued  in  a  series  of  uncomfortable  and  partial  ex- 
planations elicited  in  reply  to  successive  criticisms — 
explanations  which  would  have  borne  to  the  eye  of 
the  attentive  reader  incontestable  marks  of  uncandour; 
and  it  must  have  ended  in  everything  coming  out. 
In  such  a  case,  emphatically  principle  and  expedience 


CARDINAL  NEWMAN  S  SENSITIVENESS  287 

point  in  the  same  direction,  and  honesty  is  the  best 
policy.  To  tell  the  truth  at  once  is  an  intelligible 
and  dignified  course,  and  though  some  may  criticize, 
most  will  respect  it.  To  have  the  truth  wormed  out 
gradually,  because  evidences  are  detected  that  it  is 
being  cloaked,  is  a  gradual  process  in  the  course  of 
which  both  the  biographer  and  his  subject  suffer  many 
things  of  which  not  the  greatest  is  a  loss  of  dignity. 
This  was,  at  all  events,  the  conclusion  to  which  the 
writer  of  Cardinal  Newman's  Life  was  led  after  a  pro- 
tracted study  of  the  material  before  him.  A  less 
closely  knit  nature  or  a  simpler  nature  than  Newman's 
might  have  been  otherwise  dealt  with.  Some  bio- 
graphies can  be  truthful  without  being  intimate  or 
psychologically  minute.  But  in  Newman  apparent 
contradictions  form  a  part  of  the  consistent  whole  to 
be  exhibited ;  and  it  is  only  his  most  intimate  revela- 
tions which  give  the  clue  to  the  real  state  of  mind  of 
which  partial  aspects  shown  in  letters  to  certain  corre- 
spondents so  often  appear  to  be  simply  inconsistent. 

I  will  only  add  in  conclusion  that  while  the  faithful 
and  accurate  delineation  of  Newman's  personality, 
with  its  very  peculiar  forms  of  sensitiveness,  was 
necessary  to  the  picture  of  his  genius  and  of  his  life, 
I  was  aware  that  even  a  few  false  strokes  might,  as 
in  the  case  of  a  painting,  turn  a  reverently  executed 
likeness  into  a  caricature.  And  such  strokes  might 
easily  be  added  by  a  clumsy  or  hostile  critic  in  review- 
ing the  book.  The  lines  which  determine  the  expres- 
sion of  a  face  are  often  few  and  slight — and  pathetic 
sadness  may  be  changed  to  sneering  bitterness  by  a 
stroke  of  the  pencil. 

There  are  many  obvious  occasions  for  such  a 
travesty  of  my  picture  of  Newman,  but  I  will  mention 


288  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

one  which  is,  perhaps,  not  among  the  most  obvious. 
A  subtle  view  held  by  Newman,  or  a  view  presenting 
different  aspects,  of  which  one  is  dwelt  on  in  moods 
of  joy,  another  in  moods  of  depression,  may  by  an 
illnatured  or  unperceiving  critic  be  misrepresented  as 
the  changeableness  of  an  egotistic  mind  which  takes 
one  view  when  vanity  is  hurt,  another  when  it  is 
gratified.  Thus  when  Newman  speaks  on  his  eleva- 
tion to  the  Cardinalate  of  his  gratitude  to  the  Irish 
people  during  his  University  campaign  in  Dublin,  his 
language  has  been  in  fact  by  one  journalist  contrasted 
with  his  earlier  complaints  of  the  difficulties  in  Ireland 
which  made  his  University  scheme  unsuccessful,  and 
the  contrast  has  been  explained  in  the  way  just  indi- 
cated. Yet  the  reader  of  the  book  itself  will  see  in 
the  contemporary  letters,  including  those  to  the  Irish 
Bishops  at  the  time  of  his  resignation,  just  that  note 
of  heartfelt  gratitude  to  the  Irish  which  is  apparent  in 
the  address  of  1879.  Two  Bishops  are  excepted — 
Dr.  McHale  and  Dr.  Cullen.  And  these  two  were 
certainly  not  acquitted  in  1879.  Personally  he 
respected  them  both.  But  he  held  their  action  to 
be  largely  responsible  for  a  failure  which  wasted  years 
of  his  life.  He  was  sad  in  1857  an<^  spoke  of  the 
causes  of  his  sadness.  He  was  happy  in  1879  and 
ready  to  dwell  on  all  happy  thoughts.  But  not  even 
a  grain  of  inconsistency  is  to  be  found  in  the  docu- 
ments of  these  different  dates  in  relation  to  this  special 
point.  Indeed,  in  this  case,  as  in  those  above  referred 
to — the  Oxford  Oratory  scheme  and  the  conduct  of 
the  Rambler — nothing  is  more  remarkable  than  the 
consistency  of  view  underlying  variations  of  feeling 
and  the  recognition  of  opposite  aspects  of  the  same 
situation. 


CARDINAL   NEWMAN'S  SENSITIVENESS  289 

Considering  the  opportunity  afforded  to  the  per- 
verse critic  by  such  a  picture  as  I  have  given,  of 
making  serious  misrepresentations  by  means  of  touches 
of  untruth  in  themselves  slight,  the  biographer  has 
been  deeply  impressed  by  the  fact  that  in  hardly  a 
single  instance  has  this  opportunity  been  used  by  the 
English  press.  Reverence  for  the  great  Cardinal, 
and,  perhaps  also  some  chivalrous  feeling  as  to  the 
special  unfairness  of  defacing  a  picture  which  has 
taken  many  years  in  the  painting,  have  saved  the 
work  from  such  unworthy  treatment. 


IX 
UNION   AMONG   CHRISTIANS 

The  late  Mr.  Gladstone,  who  throughout  his  life  was 
so  profoundly  interested  in  religious  questions,  said  to 
the  present  writer  in  1894:  "The  most  important 
need  of  our  day  is  to  obtain  unity  among  Christians, 
that  they  may  successfully  withstand  the  inroads  of 
modern  infidelity.  And  I  cannot  feel  very  kindly 
towards  your  Church,  for  she  appears  to  me  to  be  the 
great  obstacle  to  such  union,  from  her  exclusiveness 
and  her  unconciliatory  policy." 

Certainly  if  we  look  at  one  side  of  her  action,  the 
Catholic  and  Roman  Church  does  appear  to  be  little 
ready  to  fraternize  with  other  Christian  bodies  or  to 
make  light  of  her  differences  from  them.  Catholics 
entirely  decline  to  kneel  in  Protestant  temples,  or  even 
to  pray  in  company  with  fellow  Christians  outside 
their  own  communion  to  the  Christ  whom  they  worship 
in  common.  They  decline  to  let  their  children  learn 
the  Bible  except  from  members  of  their  own  Church, 
though  they  fully  believe  in  the  inspired  word.  They 
will  not  allow  Catholic  school  children  to  be  taught 
the  Christian  religion  by  any  one  except  their  own  co- 
religionists, although  the  most  important  articles  of  the 
Christian  faith  are  held  by  many  others  as  firmly  as 
they  are  held  by  Catholics  themselves.  Such  peculi- 
arities are  often  not  unnaturally  assumed  to  betoken 


UNION  AMONG   CHRISTIANS  291 

narrowness  unspeakable  and  to  show  that  Catholics 
are  unable  to  recognize  any  good  outside  their  own 
Church.  And  such,  apparently,  was  Mr.  Gladstone's 
view  of  the  matter. 

Yet  there  are  other  obvious  facts  that   may  well 
make   the   hasty   critic   pause   before  passing  such  a 
verdict.     For  this  exclusiveness,  this  apparent  narrow- 
ness, is  found  not  only  among  Catholics  who  belong  to 
the  more  rigid  school  of  Ultramontanism,  but  in  those 
whose  liberality  is  well  known.     It  is  perhaps  natural 
for  me  to  refer  to  a  correspondence  which  I  have  for 
some  years  past  been  studying  minutely — that  of  the 
late  Cardinal  Newman.     Few  readers  of  his  published 
letters  can,  I  think,  have  failed  to  be  touched  by  those 
written  in  his  old  age  to  his  Evangelical  friend,  Mr. 
Edwards — letters  so  full  of  the  sense  of  brotherhood 
among   Christians — in   which   he   assures   his    corre- 
spondent that  he  has  found  in  the  Catholic  Church  the 
full  realization  of  just  that  simple  worship  of  Christ 
which  he  first  learned  in  his  childhood  from  Evangelical 
teachers.       Again,    when    his    old   friend,     Principal 
Shairp,    of  St.    Andrews,    died,    Newman   wrote    to 
Professor  Knight  a  letter  he  had  not  the  strength  to 
finish,  in  which  he  expressed  his  earnest  hope  that  the 
future  had  in  store  that  very  union  among  Christians 
against  infidelity  on  which  Mr.  Gladstone  had  set  his 
heart.     Yet  we  find  in  the  record  of  Newman's  inter- 
course with  Mark  Pattison  in  these  very  years  a  firm 
disclaimer   of  any  such  latitudinarian  sympathies   as 
should  make  light  of  distinctively  Catholic  dogma  or 
treat  it  as  a  matter  of  comparative  indifference.     And 
to  the  same  years  belong  his  successful  efforts  to  secure 
for   the    Catholic    workers  in   a    Birmingham  factory 
facilities  for  the  separate  exercise  of  their   religious 


292  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

worship  and  freedom  from  the  obligation  to  attend  the 
prayers  of  their  Protestant  fellow-workers.  Such 
tokens  would  seem  to  show  that  the  exclusiveness 
which  some  would  ascribe  to  narrowness  and  to  the 
absence  of  brotherly  feeling  towards  other  Christians 
may  co-exist  with  an  intense  desire  for  union  against 
the  common  foe  and  with  keen  sympathy  with  fellow 
Christians  in  the  aims  and  ideals  held  by  all. 

But  it  may  be  said  that  Newman's  mind  was 
characterized  by  a  liberality  not  shared  by  the  average 
Catholic.  It  is  the  Catholicism  of  Manning  rather 
than  that  of  Newman — as  we  are  often  reminded — 
which  represents  the  existing  Church  of  Rome. 
Newman's  fellow  Catholics  as  a  body  have  (it  will  be 
said)  all  his  exclusiveness  and  little  of  his  wide 
sympathy.  In  reply  to  this  suggestion  I  would  point 
out  that  it  was  Manning  and  not  Newman  who  wrote 
in  the  early  'sixties  the  beautiful  tract  "  On  the  work- 
ings of  the  Holy  Spirit  in  the  Church  of  England." 
While  I  do  not  deny  that  among  Catholics,  as  among 
others,  there  are  to  be  found  many  various  degrees  of 
breadth  of  sympathy  in  individuals,  this  is  not  deter- 
mined by  the  difference  between  the  more  liberal  and 
more  Ultramontane  schools  of  thought.  The  ex- 
clusiveness does  not,  in  either  school  of  religious 
thought,  betoken  narrowness  of  sympathy.  It  does 
not  mean,  as  Mr.  Gladstone  so  confidently  supposed, 
any  want  of  ability  or  disposition  to  co-operate  with 
fellow  Christians  against  the  spread  of  infidelity.  On 
the  contrary,  it  exists  in  those  to  whom  this  is  a 
specially  cherished  object.  In  the  old  Metaphysical 
Society,  founded  in  1869,  the  three  Catholic  members 
were  all  strict  Ultramontanes — Manning,  Father 
Dalgairns  and  W.  G.  Ward.     Yet  the  avowed  object 


UNION  AMONG   CHRISTIANS  293 

of  the  society  was  that  all  its  Christian  members 
should  act  and  argue  in  unison  against  the  agnostic 
members,  and  the  Catholics  found  themselves  on  the 
same  platform  as  Dr.  Martineau,  Mr.  R.  H.  Hutton 
and  Dean  Church.  Indeed — and  here  I  speak  from 
personal  memory  of  the  enterprise — some  of  them 
used  expressly  to  maintain  that  the  Christian  faith 
had  in  every  age  its  special  foe,  and  that  the  same 
militant  spirit  which  made  St.  Dominic  organize  his 
"  hounds  of  the  Lord,"  his  "  domini  canes"  against  the 
Albigenses  should  in  later  times  inspire  the  united 
Christian  phalanx  against  the  agnosticism  of  the 
Huxleys  and  the  Tyndalls. 

What,  then,  is  the  true  import  and  rationale  of 
the  exclusiveness  of  Catholics  ?  of  their  slowness 
to  amalgamate  with  other  Christians  ?  Why,  if  they 
wish  to  co-operate  with  others  against  the  common 
enemy,  are  they  not  more  ready  than  they  actually  are 
to  put  out  of  sight  points  of  difference,  to  join  in 
common  worship,  to  send  their  children  to  schools  in 
which  the  essence  of  Christianity  is  taught,  though  not 
the  distinctively  Catholic  doctrines  ?  Why  do  they 
seem  so  slow  to  recognize  that  in  the  great  battle  for 
Christian  faith,  forms  of  the  creed  are  minor  matters 
compared  with  its  essence  ?  The  reply  may  be  put 
in  various  ways.  The  one  which  I  think  best  appeals 
to  the  modern  mind  is  the  view  which  is  illustrated 
in  Cardinal  Newman's  Essay  on  Development,  by  his 
comparison  of  the  Catholic  Church  to  a  living 
organism.  An  organism  has  many  parts  performing 
various  functions  which  cannot  be  regarded  as  equally 
important  elements  in  its  life-work.  Yet  its  power 
to  do  its  life-work  effectively  depends  on  the  whole 
being  kept  alive  and  vigorous.     And  for  this  object 


294  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

functions  not  directly  connected  with  its  most  im- 
portant work  are  indispensable.  Cicero's  digestive 
functions  are  certainly  a  very  minor  matter  in  our 
thought  of  Cicero  as  a  world-power.  Yet  they  may 
have  played  an  all-important  part  in  the  general  well- 
being  without  which  he  would  not  have  left  us  the 
writings  by  which  his  greatness  was  established.  The 
Catholic  Church  no  doubt  claims  to  be  the  one  inde- 
fectible guardian  of  the  Christian  revelation.  Her 
exclusiveness  is  largely  based  on  this  claim.  But  it 
has  also  much  of  its  raison  d'etre  in  reasons  which 
are  the  conditions  of  efficiency  for  any  organism. 
Her  creed  and  ritual  and  organization  form  a  complete 
and  living  whole.  Once  you  begin  to  tamper  with  it 
and  to  suggest  that  only  those  parts  of  her  creed  should 
be  insisted  on  which  she  shares  with  other  Christians, 
you  threaten  the  vitality  of  the  living  organism  and 
the  individuality  on  which  its  power  largely  depends. 

The  same  consideration  holds  in  its  measure  with 
other  Christian  bodies.  In  point  of  fact,  no  denomina- 
tion with  any  force  in  it  is  content  with  professing  the 
common  measure  of  Christian  beliefs.  Each  holds 
them  in  its  own  way,  with  the  associations  and  in  the 
forms  to  which  its  history  has  given  birth.  Rightly 
or  wrongly,  on  true  lines,  or  on  lines  only  partly  true, 
or  on  false  lines,  each  has  developed  into  an  organic 
system  with  a  distinctive  character.  On  this  depends 
its  esprit  de  corps.  Tennyson  once  said,  "  You  must 
choose  in  religion  between  bigotry  and  flabbiness." 
A  sect  maintaining  only  points  of  agreement  with 
rival  sects  would  be  "flabby"  and  ineffective  in  its 
religion.  In  point  of  fact,  the  very  beliefs  held  in  com- 
mon have  their  edge  and  force  in  individual  believers  as 
parts  of  the  different  living  systems  in  which  they  are 


UNION  AMONG   CHRISTIANS  295 

found.  Thus  the  refusal  to  make  co-operation  depend 
on  amalgamation  in  organization  and  in  worship,  or 
on  the  dismissal  of  what  is  distinctive  of  the  several 
denominations  and  the  retention  only  of  what  is 
common  to  all,  may  be  grounded  simply  and  solely 
on  the  interests  of  vitality  in  religion.  To  obliterate 
what  is  distinctive  of  the  various  communions  means 
that  even  the  doctrines  which  they  do  hold  in  common, 
and  which  are  rightly  considered  the  most  important, 
lose  three-quarters  of  their  influence  and  effectiveness. 
There  is  not  in  existence  sufficient  agreement  among 
Christians  to  enable  us  to  create  forthwith  a  new 
religious  organism,  a  new  corporate  Church,  which 
should  inspire  the  necessary  esprit  de  corps.  We  must 
utilize  the  existing  esprit  de  corps  in  the  sects.  There- 
fore, if  we  would  strengthen  the  force  of  common 
Christian  beliefs  it  can  only  be  by  a  co-operation 
between  the  denominations,  which  should  not  depend 
on  destroying  their  distinctive  and  differing  elements. 
It  is  a  choice  between  an  agreement  amid  difference 
in  a  religion  which  is  inspired  and  alive,  and  an 
agreement  pure  and  simple  which  is  uninspired  and 
comparatively  dead  and  inoperative. 

The  above  expresses,  I  think,  one-half  of  the 
underlying  principle  on  which  Catholic  exclusiveness 
is  founded.  It  is  one-half  of  the  ground  on  which 
undenominationalism  stands  condemned  of  being 
ineffective  as  a  religious  force.  Therefore,  when  I 
find  the  value  of  the  denominational  principle  recog- 
nized as  it  is  in  the  prospectus  of  the  new  Constructive 
Quarterly  Review,  which  has  been  founded  for  the 
express  purpose  of  promoting  Christian  union,  I  feel 
that  Mr.  Gladstone's  forecast  to  which  I  referred  at 
the  beginning  of  my  essay  has  met  with  a  remarkable 


296  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

falsification.  In  place  of  finding  in  the  Catholic  exclu- 
siveness  the  great  enemy  of  effective  union  among 
Christians,  experience  and  observation  have  taught 
the  founders  of  this  Quarterly  that  to  adopt  the 
denominational  or  exclusive  principle  in  its  measure 
is  necessary  to  any  really  practicable  and  successful 
common  action  among  the  Christian  communions 
against  modern  unbelief. 

Let  us  take,  by  way  of  illustration  of  what  I  have 
already  said  in  general  terms,  a  very  prominent  and 
distinctive  Catholic  ideal — that  of  the  monastic  life. 
If  we  take  it  in  its  fullest  expression,  as  including  the 
active  as  well  as  the  contemplative  orders,  we  have  in 
this  ideal  the  inspiring  force  of  more  than  half  the 
greatest  achievements  of  the  Catholic  Church  in  the 
past.  From  the  Benedictines  in  the  fifth  century  to 
the  Jesuits  in  the  sixteenth  you  have  in  the  history  of 
religious  orders  the  story  of  the  greatest  successes  of 
the  Catholic  religion.  These  orders  are  all  based  on 
certain  ways  of  carrying  out  the  ideals  of  the  New 
Testament.  To  Mr.  Kingsley  and  to  his  successors 
in  our  time  they  seem  poor  and  unmanly  ways.  Are 
we  for  this  reason  to  waive  the  monastic  ideal  as 
unessential — as  a  point  of  difference  which  it  would 
be  well  to  sink,  with  the  object  of  combining  and 
agreeing  with  such  as  Mr.  Kingsley  against  the 
infidel  ?  Probably  far  more  will  be  done  to  check 
infidelity  by  the  zeal  and  esprit  de  corps  of  even  one 
among  the  hundreds  of  Catholic  religious  orders  than 
by  all  that  the  religion  in  common  between  Mr. 
Kingsley  and  the  Pope  would  be  likely  to  effect — not 
because  the  points  in  common  between  them  are  not 
the  most  important  ones,  but  because  in  the  monastic 
vocation  you  have  the  inspiration  and  the  faith  that 


UNION  AMONG   CHRISTIANS  297 

can  move  mountains,  while  Mr.  Kingsley  and  the 
Pope  are  not  likely  to  combine  so  as  to  create  any 
parallel  esprit  de  corps  or  self-denying  zeal  in  their 
followers.  Zeal  is  needed  as  well  as  truth,  heat  as 
well  as  light.  Nothing  is  more  important  than  belief 
in  God.  Yet  a  miscellaneous  collection  of  theists 
would  probably  be  comparatively  lukewarm  and  in- 
effective apostles.  But  if  Mr.  Kingsley  or — to  give 
a  more  probable  instance — Herr  Eucken,  of  Jena, 
publishes  a  fine  essay  against  materialism  and  a  great 
vindication  of  man's  spiritual  nature,  if  Hegel  writes 
convincing  words  on  "self-realization  by  self-denial," 
let  us  by  all  means  stand  by  them  and  gladly  use  their 
arguments  and  extend  their  influence.  Do  not,  how- 
ever, let  us  think  that  we  shall  do  this  more  effectively 
by  abandoning  the  distinctive  ideals  which  have  created 
our  own  heroes  and  done  our  work  in  the  past. 

It  will  certainly  be  objected  to  in  the  above  remarks 
that  they  ignore  a  principal  difficulty  in  the  path  of 
Christian  union  which  the  more  liberal  Christians  with 
whom  Mr.  Gladstone  sympathized  had  tried  to  meet 
by  minimizing  points  of  difference  between  the  sects. 
The  difficulty  in  question  is  that  in  very  many  cases 
these  distinctive  doctrines  are  doctrines  which  speak 
of  mutual  hate  and  positive  disunion.  Luther  protests 
against  the  superstitions  and  corruptions  of  Rome. 
This  protest  is  what  stirred  up  and  still  sustains  the 
esprit  de  corps  of  Lutheran  Protestants.  Rome  anathe- 
matizes the  doctrines  of  Luther.  The  zeal  of  Alva  is 
fed  by  the  bonfires  with  which  he  burns  the  heretic. 
Sectarian  tenets  do  not  constitute  merely  that  individu- 
ality of  creed  which  gives  edge  to  conviction  and  enables 
agreement  amid  difference  among  believers  to  be  the 
more  effective  in  the  fight  against  unfaith.     They  are 


298  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

a  source  or  a  direct  consequence  of  mutual  hostility 
between  the  believers  themselves.  If,  then,  you  grant 
that  the  full  force  of  religious  zeal  is  largely  depend- 
ent on  the  esprit  de  corps  of  the  various  religious  com- 
munions, and  that  this  esprit  de  corps  would  evaporate  if 
their  distinctive  doctrines  were  dropped  and  only  "  our 
common  Christianity  "  were  retained,  that  is  an  argu- 
ment not  only,  as  it  professes  to  be,  against  latitudina- 
rianism,  but  against  the  possibility  of  any  effective 
union  among  Christians.  In  emphasizing  sectarian 
tenets  you  are  encouraging  those  specific  beliefs  which 
tell  directly  for  disunion — nay,  for  positive  strife 
between  Christians.  You  are  breeding  not  effective 
"  hounds  of  the  Lord  "  to  fight  the  infidels  of  the  day, 
but  rather  Kilkenny  cats  who  will  fight  until  they  have 
devoured  each  other. 

It  is  to  be  hoped  that  the  best  detailed  reply  to 
this  objection  will  be  found  in  the  future  history  of 
the  Constructive  Quarterly.  Its  promoters  are  con- 
fident that  it  will  reveal  a  very  real  and  effective 
sense  of  Christian  brotherhood  and  a  very  sensible 
abatement  of  the  hostile  attitude  which  would  a 
hundred  years  ago  have  made  any  scheme  for  union 
among  the  sects  Utopian.  But,  speaking  generally, 
the  answer  is,  I  think,  implied  in  the  second  rule 
of  the  Constructive  Quarterly,  that  each  sect,  while 
advocating  its  own  views  in  full,  should  refrain  from 
attacking  its  neighbours.  Even  the  exclusive  Church 
of  Rome  may  recognize  that  there  is  an  element  of 
truth  in  the  positive  side  of  most  heretical  movements. 
Catholics  are  not  concerned  with  maintaining  that  there 
were  no  abuses  connected  with  the  sale  of  indulgences 
in  the  sixteenth  century.  They  condemn  those  who 
then  worked  for  revolt,   but  they  do  not  deny  that 


UNION  AMONG   CHRISTIANS  299 

element  of  justice  in  their  protest  which  told  of  the 
need  for  reform.  Indeed,  the  whole  of  the  Catholic 
counter-reformation  of  the  sixteenth  century,  associated 
with  such  names  as  St.  Ignatius  Loyola  and  St.  Philip 
Neri,  drew  its  inspiration  from  indignation  in  the 
Roman  communion  itself  against  those  very  abuses 
which  led  to  the  formation  of  the  Protestant  sects  as  a 
counterblast.  The  underlying  principle  of  the  Con- 
structive Quarterly,  as  I  understand  it,  is  that  many  of 
these  old  controversies  are  not  now  actual  or  urgent, 
as  they  once  were.  For  Catholics  a  new  foe  is  more 
dangerous  than  Protestantism,  for  Protestants  the 
same  new  foe  is  more  dangerous  than  Catholicism. 
A  new  motive  for  combination  exists  which  is  likely 
to  make  the  positive  and  true  side  of  the  tenets  of 
each  sect  more  prominent,  while  the  negative  and 
aggressive  side  is  likely  to  grow  less,  and  even  to 
disappear  in  some  cases,  if  all  parties  endeavour  to 
bring  this  consummation  about.  The  ideal  aim  is 
that  every  group  of  Christians  should  preserve  its 
esprit  de  corps,  but  should  at  the  same  time  refrain 
from  mutual  hostility.  And  though,  like  all  ideals, 
this  is  not  likely  to  be  completely  realized,  some 
approximation  may  be  made  towards  its  realization. 
When  a  Catholic  and  a  Calvinist  have  been  fighting 
on  the  same  side  for  a  time  in  the  battle  against 
unfaith  and  have  come  to  look  at  each  other  with 
friendly  and  understanding  eyes,  to  be  desirous  each 
of  finding  in  his  fellow  Christian's  creed  strong  points 
telling  for  union  and  not  weak  points  for  attack, 
the  Calvinist  discovers  that  a  good  deal  which  he  has 
been  in  the  habit  of  regarding  as  his  irreconcilable 
quarrel  with  Rome  on  Grace  and  Predestination  is 
tolerated  in  the  Catholic  Church,  and  is  found  in  the 


3oo  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

doctrine  of  St.  Augustine  and  even  in  that  of  St. 
Thomas  Aquinas.  Protests  against  formalism  and 
externalism  in  religion  which  inspired  the  zeal  of 
Luther  against  Rome  will  be  found  to  have  inspired 
equally  his  arch-enemy,  St.  Ignatius  Loyola,  in  fashion- 
ing the  famous  "Spiritual  Exercises." 

Nothing  but  experience  can  determine  the  exact 
issue  of  the  endeavour  before  us.  Therefore  to  dis- 
cuss this  matter  further  would  be  premature.  Real 
but  at  present  unconscious  points  of  agreement  will,  it 
is  to  be  hoped,  come  more  clearly  to  light  under  the 
growing  influence  of  a  common  zeal  against  the 
revival  of  pagan  ethics  and  the  destruction  of  faith 
in  the  unseen  which  now  threatens  the  modern  world. 
If  the  attention  and  energy  of  all  Christians  is  concen- 
trated on  the  crusade  against  those  movements  which 
threaten  all  religious  belief  and  principle,  the  force  and 
heat  of  religious  zeal  will  gradually  be  transferred  more 
and  more  to  this  common  crusade.  An  immediate 
attempt  to  bring  down  the  existing  sects  to  a  dead 
level  of  positive  belief  would,  on  the  contrary,  put  out 
the  flame  instead  of  changing  its  direction.  And,  once 
extinguished,  it  might  be  hard  to  rekindle. 

How  far  combination  will  be  possible  against  a 
common  enemy,  how  far  allies  who  fight  under  the 
same  banner  will  find  that  they  have  all  along  agreed 
more  than  they  had  supposed  even  in  matters  they 
had  regarded  as  points  of  difference,  how  far  good 
will  and  mutual  trust  can  allay  apparent  differences 
which  bad  will  and  suspiciousness  had  a  large  share  in 
creating,  remains  to  be  seen.  I  have  said  enough  to 
show  the  nature  of  the  experiment  and  the  grounds  on 
which  it  may  commend  itself  to  one  like  myself  who 
is  a  member  of  the  Ancient  Church. 


X 

THE  CONSERVATIVE  GENIUS  OF 
THE  CHURCH 

AN   ADDRESS  TO   THE   CATHOLIC  CONFERENCE  OF  1900 

I  wish  to  say  a  few  words  on  a  phenomenon  apparent 
on  the  surface  of  the  history  of  the  Church,  which 
has  a  very  practical  application  to  our  own  time. 
And  if  for  a  few  minutes  I  have  to  dwell  on  events 
far  removed  from  the  present,  I  would  ask  you  to 
give  them  patient  attention.  Before  concluding  I 
hope  to  show  how  closely  they  bear  on  problems 
which  are  just  now  before  the  minds  of  many  English 
Catholics,  and  what  light  is  thrown  by  the  past  on  a 
true  solution  of  present  difficulties. 

The  Church  has  from  its  beginning  lived  amid  the 
world,  and  had  to  face  the  characteristic  social  and 
intellectual  movements  of  each  successive  age.  The 
first  thing  that  strikes  one  from  the  days  of  the  very 
first  heretics — the  Gnostics — to  the  days  of  the 
Church's  last  assailants  —  the  Agnostics  —  is  her 
attitude  of  uncompromising  resistance  to  rival  theories 
of  life,  which  strove  to  dictate  to  her  and  bend  her  to 
their  will.  From  the  days  of  the  Gnostics  to  those 
of  Abelard,  from  Abelard  to  Luther,  from  Luther  to 
Lamennais,  the  same  thing  has  been  apparent.  The 
Gnostics  tried  to  force  Christianity  to  identify  itself 


3o2  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

with  a  fanciful  philosophical  system,  and  banished  the 
Old  Testament  and  the  historical  groundwork  of  the 
faith  ;  Abelard — as  St.  Bernard  bitterly  complained  in 
his  letters — tried  to  base  faith  purely  on  the  dialectics 
of  Aristotle  and  on  human  reason,  failing  in  his  account 
to  give  their  due  place  to  the  humility  of  faith, 
the  sense  of  mystery  apparent  in  the  theology  of  the 
Fathers ;  Luther  practically  banished  the  office  of  the 
Church  in  mediating  between  God  and  the  soul,  and 
advocated  individual  private  judgment  in  interpreting 
the  Scriptures ;  Lamennais  wished  to  commit  the 
Church  to  a  theory  of  unfettered  liberalism.  To  accept 
any  of  these  systems  would  have  been  for  the  Church  to 
sacrifice  her  own  authority,  and  her  own  individuality. 
In  each  case  the  Church  was  confronted  with  a  form 
of  rationalismus,  or  its  twin  sister  liberalismus.  But 
there  was  only  one  ismtis  which  she  could  accept — 
Christianismus.  She  had  to  guard  the  revelation 
handed  down.  Any  system  which  professed  to  be 
complete  and  yet  ignored  the  mysterious  truth  com- 
mitted to  her,  or  gave  a  rival  account  of  life  or  of 
faith  and  presumed  to  dictate  to  her,  was  in  the 
first  instance  met  by  her  with  the  weapons  of 
sheer  resistance. 

The  second  phenomenon  is  that  all  the  systems 
she  opposed  contained  elements  which  were  good  and 
true.  And  from  not  one  did  she  fail  ultimately  to 
assimilate  something,  in  most  cases  a  great  deal,  once 
their  aggressive  character  had  been  broken  by  her 
resistance.  "She  broke  them  in  pieces,"  writes 
Cardinal  Newman,  and  then  he  significantly  adds, 
"she  divided  the  spoils."  Readers  of  Cardinal 
Newman's  Essay  on  Development,  and  of  Professor 
Harnack's   History  of  Dogma — which  we   value   for 


THE  CONSERVATIVE  GENIUS  OF  THE   CHURCH     303 

its  facts,  however  often  we  may  reject  its  theories — 
know  how  much  the  Church  adopted  of  the  methods 
and  ideas  which,  in   aggressive  combination,   formed 
the  Gnostic  heresies.     The  very  method  of  applying 
the   intellect   systematically   to    the   truths    of    faith, 
according     to     both     writers,    originated     with     the 
Gnostics.     And  dogmatic  theology  not  only  adopted 
that  method,  but  availed  itself  of  much  of  the  Greek 
philosophy   which   the    Gnostics    had    used    against 
orthodoxy.      The     dialectical     method    of     Abelard 
(again),    and    his    devotion     to    the    philosophy    of 
Aristotle,  so  strenuously  opposed  by  St.   Bernard  and 
the  orthodox  of  the  twelfth  century,  became  in  the 
hands   of  St.    Thomas    Aquinas   the    instruments   of 
faith.     Even  Luther's  undisciplined  and  exaggerated 
pleas  contained  a  protest  against  real  corruption  and 
formalism  within  the  Church  ;  and  the  counter-reforma- 
tion of  the  Jesuits  and  their  allies  included  a  revival 
of  the  inner  life  of  the  soul  which  showed  that  the 
Church  was  ready  to  appropriate  grains  of  truth  and 
salutary   warnings   even   from    her   most   implacable 
enemies.     Fas  est  et  ab  hoste  doceri.     Lastly,  while  in 
the  encyclical  Mirari  vos  Gregory  XVI.  condemned 
the   liberalistic  theory  of  Lamennais,  we  have  seen 
ever  since  its  appearance  among  the  most  orthodox  in 
Lamennais'  own  country,  from  Lacordaire  himself  to 
the  Comte  de  Mun  and  M.  Harmel,  active  sympathy 
with    the  democracy.       There   has   been    a    gradual 
development    of    popular   organization    and   freedom 
of  association  (which  Lamennais  so  strongly  urged) 
within  the  Church,    although   Lamennais'  attempt  to 
identify  the  Church  with  the  liberalistic  and  democratic 
principle  was  crushed  once  and  for  all. 

When     I    ascribe    this    double    phenomenon    in 


3o4  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

Church  history,  of  resistance  and  subsequent  assimila- 
tion, to  the  conservative  principle  of  the  Church,  I 
may  at  first  appear  to  maintain  a  paradox.  It  may 
be  urged  that  the  first  attitude — of  opposition  to 
aggressive  novelty — is  an  exhibition  of  the  con- 
servative principle  ;  but  that  the  second — the  sub- 
sequent assimilation  of  portions  of  what  was  rejected 
— is  not.  To  this  I  would  reply  that  to  identify 
conservatism  simply  with  the  rejection  of  what  is 
extraneous  and  new  in  form  is  to  identify  it  with  a 
principle  of  decay.  To  preserve  a  building  we  must 
indeed  resist  those  who  would  pull  it  down.  But  we 
must  also  repair  it,  replace  what  is  worn  out  by  what 
is  new,  and  fit  it  to  last  in  the  varying  conditions  of 
life.  True  conservatism  involves  constructive  activity 
as  well  as  resistance  to  destructive  activity.  Periodical 
reform  and  reconstruction  belong  to  its  very  essence. 

And  now  I  think  we  have  reached  the  heart  of 
the  matter.  There  are  two  classes  of  enemies  to  the 
true  conservatism  which  would  preserve  for  present 
use  an  ancient  building — those  who  would  pull  it 
down,  and  those  who  would  leave  it  untouched,  with- 
out repairs,  without  the  conditions  which  render  it 
habitable  in  the  present,  superstitiously  fearing  that 
to  alter  it  in  any  respect  is  to  violate  what  is  venerable 
and  sacred.  Had  Napoleon  bombarded  Venice  when 
he  took  it,  a  hundred  years  ago,  and  destroyed  the 
Palace  of  the  Doges,  he  would  have  ruined  a  noble 
and  ancient  building.  But  had  the  municipality  in 
1899  failed  to  note  the  undermining  and  sapping  effect 
of  the  gradual  action  of  the  water  in  the  canal,  and 
omitted  to  take  active  steps  for  its  repair  and  pre- 
servation, they  too  would  have  been  destroyers. 
Their  passivity  and  false  conservatism   would   have 


THE   CONSERVATIVE   GENIUS  OF  THE   CHURCH     305 

been  as  ruinous  to  the  ancient  fabric,  as  the  activity 
and  aggressiveness  of  the  most  reckless  bombardment. 

And  so  the  Church,  with  a  true  and  not  a  false 
conservatism,  has  in  the  past  resisted  both  classes  of 
foes.  The  aggressive  movements  of  the  times  she 
has  opposed.  To  yield  to  them  would  have  been  to 
identify  herself  with  partly  false,  partly  one-sided  and 
exaggerated  phases  of  thought,  and  lose  her  own 
authority  and  her  own  individual  character.  But  each 
movement  witnessed  to  a  real  advance  of  human 
thought,  new  truth  amid  new  error,  and  to  fresh 
developments  of  human  activity.  It  supplied  material 
for  repairs  and  reconstruction  within  the  Church 
although  it  was  unacceptable  as  a  whole.  '*  The 
sects,"  writes  Cardinal  Newman,  "contained  elements 
of  truth  amid  their  errors."  Had  the  Church  been 
content  with  a  false  conservatism — the  conservatism 
of  mere  resistance  to  innovation — and  then  remained 
passive,  having  escaped  the  dangers  of  aggression, 
she  would  have  succumbed  to  the  danger  of  decay. 
She  alternated  instead,  not  between  resistance  and 
passivity,  but  between  resistance  and  the  most  active 
process  of  adaptation  and  assimilation.  The  new 
phases  of  thought  which  the  various  philosophical  and 
religious  movements  represented,  the  incidental  truths 
they  brought  to  light,  had  all  to  be  taken  account  of 
and  utilized.  New  conditions  had  to  be  met,  new 
secular  truths  assimilated.  New  methods  which  were 
entering  into  the  very  life  of  the  age  had  to  be  in- 
troduced into  the  Church. 

The  difference  between  the  two  processes  is,  as 
Cardinal  Newman  has  pointed  out,  that  the  first 
process,  of  resistance,  is  the  work  of  authority,  of 
Rome  itself;  the  second,  of  assimilation,  is  the  work 

x 


3o6  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

of  individuals,  authority  only  tolerating  and  not 
necessarily  helping  it,  until  it  is  so  far  tested  that 
authority  can  more  or  less  ratify  what  individuals 
have  initiated. 

The  palmary  instance  of  this  assimilative  activity 
— because  the  change  was  greatest — was  the  complete 
adaptation  of  theology  to  Aristotelian  philosophy  and 
to  dialectical  treatment  by  St.  Thomas  Aquinas.  A 
reader  of  St.  Bernard's  letters  would  deem  it  almost 
impossible  that,  in  the  century  following  his  time,  a 
system  should  prevail  in  the  Church  containing  so 
much  which  St.  Bernard  bitterly  resented  and  con- 
demned in  Abelard.  The  feat  was  accomplished  by 
a  saintly  theologian,  who  was  devoted  to  and  impreg- 
nated by  both  the  Aristotelian  philosophy  and  the 
Catholic  tradition  of  the  Fathers.  The  patristic  tradi- 
tion preserved  the  necessary  conservative  element  in 
the  new  system.  It  was  a  gigantic  scheme  of  con- 
servative reform,  a  signal  protest  against  the  "  fos- 
silism,"  which  calls  itself  conservative,  the  lines  of  the 
new  system  being  mainly  determined  by  the  intel- 
lectual conditions  of  the  time.  Averroes  and  Avicenna, 
the  Arabians,  and  Maimonides  the  Jew,  had  marked 
out  the  terrain  of  philosophical  discussion.  With  the 
latter  as  an  ally,  and  the  former  largely  as  opponents, 
St.  Thomas  went  over  the  whole  ground  to  be  covered 
without  flinching,  and  left  the  monuments  of  his  work 
which  we  possess — the  Sumrna  contra  Gentiles  and  the 
Summa  theologica.  What  in  Abelard  had  been  nega- 
tive and  destructive  became  in  St.  Thomas's  pages 
constructive.  And  the  paradox  was  realized  which 
Harnack  describes  in  these  words :  "  The  negative 
theologian  (Abelard)  really  laid  the  foundation  for  the 
classical  structure  of  medieval  conservative  theology." 


THE   CONSERVATIVE   GENIUS   OF  THE   CHURCH     307 

The  fundamental  difference  between  false  con- 
servatism and  true  conservatism  is  that  the  former  is 
blind  and  passive,  the  latter  open-eyed  and  active. 
Both  recognize  that  the  Church's  business  is  to  pre- 
serve the  theological  structure  whereby  the  original 
revelation  is  protected,  but  the  former  tends  blindly  to 
cling  to  the  status  quo,  the  latter  insists  on  surveying 
the  building,  renewing  what  is  decayed,  replacing 
what  is  worn  out,  examining  intelligently  whether  a 
particular  part  of  the  construction  now  does  the  work 
for  which  it  was  originally  intended. 

And  now  to  apply  these  remarks  to  our  present 
conditions  in  England. 

We  are  in  some  respects  in  a  period  of  transition. 
The  days  when  Catholics  were  excluded  from  public 
life — from  Parliament,  from  the  Universities,  from  the 
liberal  professions — are,  it  is  true,  long  past.  But  the 
habits  which  those  days  had  created  long  survived. 
Catholics,  until  quite  recently,  passed  all  the  critical 
years  of  education,  apart  from  any  non-Catholic 
influences,  in  their  own  schools  and  colleges.  In 
after-life,  to  a  very  large  extent,  they  held  aloof  from 
their  fellow-countrymen.  There  was  a  Catholic  club. 
There  were  in  every  class  groups  of  friends,  all 
Catholics,  forming  their  own  society.  This  state  of 
things  is  giving  place  to  another.  In  the  Universities, 
in  London  clubs,  in  the  general  world,  Catholics  are 
more  and  more  coming  to  associate  freely  with  their 
neighbours. 

One  noteworthy  consequence  of  this,  with  which  I 
am  here  concerned,  does  not  apply  to  all  who  attend 
this  conference  or  to  all  members  of  the  Catholic 
Truth  Society.  It  applies  especially  to  a  compara- 
tively small  number,  yet  an  important  section.     Those 


3o8  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

who  in  the  Universities  or  elsewhere  are  keenly 
interested  in  the  social,  intellectual,  or  scientific  move- 
ments of  the  time,  find  themselves  face  to  face  with  a 
number  of  problems  which  are  freely  discussed.  And 
they  find  it  sometimes  assumed  as  evident  by  their 
non-Catholic  friends  that  the  Church  is  hopelessly 
reactionary,  and  does  not  face  or  realize  conclusions 
which  are,  to  those  with  whom  they  associate,  the 
assured  conquests  of  modern  science.  To  concentrate 
our  ideas  by  taking  obvious  instances,  they  see  those 
outside  the  Church  busy  adapting  Christian  teaching 
to  modern  biblical  criticism,  and  to  the  broad  results 
of  the  evolutionary  hypothesis.  They  see  that  so  far 
as  the  Church  herself  has  taken  a  public  line  in  these 
questions  it  has  been  almost  entirely  hostile.  The 
general  drift  of  the  Encyclical  Providentissimzis  is 
against  the  results  and  even  the  methods  of  the  higher 
criticism.  The  most  notorious  attempt  of  a  Catholic 
theologian  to  adapt  the  Evolution  theory  to  Catholic 
teaching — Father  Zahm's  work — has  been  condemned. 
Now,  if  we  realize  the  systematic  action  of  the 
Church  in  the  past,  to  which  I  have  called  attention, 
the  difficulty  presented  by  this  attitude  is  far  less 
than  appears  at  first  sight.  It  is  a  patent  fact  that 
both  the  Higher  Criticism  and  the  theory  of  Evolution 
were  first  brought  prominently  before  the  European 
mind  in  a  form  hostile  to  Christianity.  The  first 
instinctive  action  of  self-protection,  of  conservatism, 
on  the  part  of  the  Church  has  been  necessarily  to 
oppose  them.  But  while  the  broad,  official,  authorita- 
tive action  of  the  Church  is  still  maintaining  an 
attitude  of  opposition,  many  Catholics  in  England, 
Germany,  France,  and  elsewhere  are,  in  the  retire- 
ment of  their  studies,  working  out  a  modus  vivendi 


THE   CONSERVATIVE   GENIUS   OF   THE   CHURCH     309 

between  Faith  on  the  one  hand  and  the  assured  or 
probable  results  of  Science  and  Criticism  on  the  other. 
It  is  a  very  close  parallel  to  what  happened  in  the 
thirteenth  century  in  reference  to  Aristotle's  philosophy. 
Frederick  Schlegel  has  described  how  in  that  century 
"  the  inclination  of  the  age  to  absolute  modes  of  think- 
ing," and  other  causes,  created  an  "  irresistible  rage 
for  Aristotle,  reputed  as  he  was  to  contain  the  very 
essence  of  all  liberal  science  and  philosophy."  And 
Aristotle  was  imported  from  the  East  with  the  com- 
ments of  the  Arabians  Averroes  and  Avicenna,  who 
gave  a  pantheistic  character  to  his  teaching.  The 
danger  to  the  faith  of  his  Christian  readers  was  great. 
The  public,  official  action  of  the  Church  was  largely 
hostile  to  the  whole  movement.  The  council  of  Paris 
in  1 2 10  ordered  Aristotle's  metaphysical  works  to  be 
burnt.  Five  years  later,  by  order  of  Innocent  III., 
Robert  de  Courcon,  a  papal  legate,  forbade  the  faith- 
ful to  read  them.  A  superficial  observer,  or  an 
upholder  of  the  principles  of  modern  liberalism, 
might  well  have  said  that  the  Church  was  hopelessly 
reactionary,  in  opposing  the  characteristic  intellectual 
movement  of  the  time.  But  in  those  very  years  there 
was  also  proceeding  a  movement  of  assimilation. 
Albertus  Magnus  was  already  at  work  sifting  Aristotle 
and  adapting  him  to  Christian  theology.  And  before 
the  century  was  finished  all  official  opposition  was 
withdrawn,  and  St.  Thomas  Aquinas  had  completed 
what  his  master  began.  The  official  opposition,  which 
protected  the  Church  from  being  overrun  by  a  rational- 
istic and  pantheistic  movement,  did  not  prove  that  in 
the  event  the  Church  could  not  come  to  terms  with 
all  that  was  good  or  even  tolerable  in  the  metaphysics 
which  had  been  at  first,  from  circumstances,  dangerous 


3io  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

to  the  faith.  And  it  is  equally  true  now  that  while 
the  official  attitude  of  the  Church  is  suspicious  or 
hostile,  the  very  best  Catholic  thought  is  effecting  the 
desired  reconciliation.  Both  functions  of  the  con- 
servative principle  in  the  Church  are  being  carried  on. 

But  now  we  come  to  a  further  difficulty.  It  may 
be  plausibly  urged  that  the  conditions  of  the  nine- 
teenth century  are  not  those  of  the  thirteenth  ;  that 
modern  thought  now  inevitably  penetrates  to  the 
Christian  people ;  that  rapidity  of  discriminating 
assimilation  is  now  a  far  more  pressing  need ;  that 
even  temporary  intransigeance  may  be  unavailing  and 
disastrous.  Authority  (it  may  be  said)  is  so  intent  on 
opposition  that  it  unduly  retards  the  assimilative 
action  which  takes  place  slowly  in  spite  of  it.  It  dis- 
courages and  opposes  it.  This  is,  I  think,  a  fair 
matter  for  investigation.  If  in  this  or  that  case  the 
particular  form  of  opposition  adopted  is  useless,  if  it 
attempts  to  keep  people  from  knowing  theories  which 
every  one  must  know,  and  with  this  impracticable 
object  forbids  the  freedom  required  for  dealing  with 
them  from  a  Catholic  point  of  view,  Catholics  must 
suffer.  But  assuming  that  there  is  some  truth  in  this 
supposition,  those  who  desire  that  such  a  state  of 
things  should  be  modified  must  not  fail  to  bear  in 
mind,  in  their  forecast  of  what  is  possible  or  practic- 
able, the  exigencies  of  the  conservative  genius  of  the 
Church.  Reform,  adaptation  to  new  circumstances, 
may  be  needed  now,  as  it  has  been  so  often  in  the 
past,  but  it  must  be  what  I  have  called  "conservative 
reform."  The  principle  of  caution  and  resistance  to 
dangerous  movements  is  not  abrogated,  because  its 
action,  to  be  effectual,  must  be  modified. 

No   doubt   since   the    Reformation   the  forces   of 


THE  CONSERVATIVE  GENIUS  OF  THE   CHURCH     311 

resistance  have  been  much  more  developed  in  the 
Church's  theology  than  the  forces  of  assimilation. 
The  tremendous  revolt  of  half  of  Christendom  called 
for  a  strenuous  movement,  within  the  Church,  of 
militarism  and  self-defence,  and  rendered  very  difficult 
the  more  liberal  policy  required  for  assimilation.  The 
new  state  of  things  inaugurated  in  the  present  century, 
when  many  old  controversies  are  practically  spent, 
when  we  need  the  best  and  most  open-eyed  and  fairest 
treatment  of  all  contemporary  thought,  is  at  variance 
with  the  polemical  and  repressive  habits  which  the 
Reformation  of  necessity  inaugurated.  The  martial 
law  which  a  state  of  siege  necessitates  would  dwarf 
the  normal  development  of  the  community  in  time  of 
peace.  This,  I  think,  is  very  fairly  maintainable.  And 
thus  we  find  Catholics  in  many  countries  urging  the 
necessity  of  the  cultivation  of  intellectual  habits  and 
training  adapted  to  a  new  state  of  things.  Authority 
is  (presumably)  glad  to  know  the  experience  of  those 
who  are  trying  to  serve  the  Church,  and  find  them- 
selves handicapped  by  conditions  which  are  applicable 
mainly  to  a  different  state  of  society. 

In  general,  if  the  Church  is  losing  touch  with  or 
the  power  to  control  any  deep  movement  in  the  hearts 
of  men,  something  is  probably  out  of  repair  in  the 
machinery  she  employs.  Such  great  orders  as 
Dominicans,  Franciscans,  Jesuits,  have  owed  their 
very  foundation  to  temporary  defect  of  this  kind  within 
the  Church.  They  were  new  mechanisms  to  answer 
new  needs.  It  is  not  (I  need  hardly  say)  a  question 
of  the  Catholic  faith,  but  of  the  effectiveness  of  some 
portion  of  the  machinery  used  by  the  Church  in  deal- 
ing with  the  world  around  her. 

The  practical  question   in  individual  cases  which 


3i2  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

may  concern  us  is  how  to  deal  with  particular  parts  of 
the  machinery  which  may  have   become  ineffective. 
There  are  three  programmes  proposed  which  I  will 
state  in  homely  popular  language.     The  Radical  says 
in  effect,  "  Cast  it  away  as  useless."     The  false  Con- 
servative  says,    "  Leave  it  alone.     It   is  impious   to 
touch  it,   or  to  examine  whether  it  is   in  or  out  of 
repair."      The    true     Conservative     reformer     says, 
"  Thoroughly  overhaul  the  machinery  until  you  find 
out    exactly  what   is  wrong ;    mend  it  and  fit  it  for 
existing  conditions."     For  example,  the  question  has 
recently  been  asked — I  mention  it  only  to  illustrate 
my  meaning — Do  priests  find  the  proportion  of  atten- 
tion devoted  in  their  training  to  scholastic  philosophy 
and  the  Aristotelian  method  a  hindrance  to  their  fully 
understanding  and  influencing  those  whom  they  are 
called  upon  to  understand  and  influence  ?     I  am  not 
proposing  to  ask  this  question,  which  is  outside  the 
sphere  of  our  discussion  here.      I   give  it  only  as  a 
concrete   example    which    illustrates    the   three   pro- 
grammes which  have   been  proposed  in  such  cases. 
The   Radical    reformer  will  say — indeed,   has   said — 
"  Sweep  the  system  away."     That  is  to  say,  "  Bom- 
bard St.   Mark's   and  the   Doge's   Palace,    and  build 
a   modern   church  and  palace  in  their  place."     The 
false  Conservative  will  say,  and  has  said,  "  Leave  the 
system  precisely  as  it  stands.     The  structure  is  sacred. 
To  consider  its  effectiveness  under  modern  conditions 
is  a  want  of  faith."     That  is  to  say,  "  Let  the  water 
do  its  worst  to  the  foundations.     The  Palace  of  the 
Doges  must  last  for  ever."     The  advocate  for  con- 
servative reform  may  claim  the  analogy  of  the  Church's 
action  in  the  past  in  regarding  both  these  programmes 
as  fatalistic  and  unintelligent.    He  has  good  precedents 


THE   CONSERVATIVE   GENIUS   OF  THE   CHURCH     313 

when  he  urges,  "  Examine  the  structure.  Repair  it 
where  it  is  necessary.  Consider  Scholasticism  not 
as  what  it  is  not — a  part  of  Revelation ;  but  see 
intelligently  what  work  it  was  intended  by  the  Church 
to  accomplish  and  how  far  it  does  that  work  now.  Its 
form  was  originally  intended  not  as  the  maintenance 
of  something  ancient  and  sacred,  for  it  was  entirely 
new — an  adaptation  to  the  times,  to  the  new  intellectual 
fashion.  Nevertheless  in  that  form  the  best  theo- 
logical thought  and  even  parts  of  revelation  have 
subsequently  been  expressed.  These  must  be  guarded 
as  sacred.  How  far  is  it  possible  to  preserve  its 
permanent  legacy  of  Catholic  thought,  and  yet  to 
make  theology  do  in  the  most  effective  way  what 
it  was  meant  to  do — influence  and  affect  the  religious 
thought  of  the  day,  now  that  medieval  form  does 
not  appeal  to  the  intellect  of  the  age  ? "  Here 
is  an  important  and  most  practical  problem  which 
needs  full  consideration  among  those  whom  it 
concerns. 

Take  again  the  social  movement.  To  press  the 
theories  of  Socialism  on  the  Church  is  to  court  rebuff 
from  those  in  authority.  It  is  exactly  such  an  "  ism  " 
which  the  Church  must  oppose.  Yet  this  is  what 
Radical  reformers  would  more  or  less  attempt.  But 
for  the  Church  to  hold  its  place  and  influence  in  a 
democratic  age  is  a  real  and  most  practical  problem,  a 
problem  which  Leo  XIII.  has  so  boldly  faced  in  the 
Encyclical  Rerum  novarum.  Those  who  would  simply 
resist  the  democracy  are  not  real  Conservatives.  For 
simply  to  resist  it  is  to  fail  to  preserve  the  influence 
of  Catholicism  on  the  people.  In  this  department 
as  in  others,  the  forces  of  contemporary  thought 
and  life  would  undermine  the  Church  if  the  Church 


314  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

did  not  deal  with,  understand,  and   partly  assimilate 
them. 

Take,  again,  the  modern  cry  for  liberty  of  discus- 
sion and  the  liberty  for  all  to  read  what  they  please. 
The   Radicals  would  simply  open  the  door  wide  to 
such  a  programme.     The  Church  has  always  guarded 
the  faith  of  the  weak,  has  always  recognized  the  plain 
fact  that  wild,  random,  unbelieving  talk  or  reading 
may   upset   their   faith.       "  Novelty,"   says    Cardinal 
Newman,  M  is  often  error  for  those  who  are  unprepared 
for  it,  from  the  refraction  with  which  it  enters    into 
their  conceptions."     The  Church  cannot  sweep  aside 
the  principle  on  which  she  has  always  acted.     The 
real  question  is,  Does  the  existing  machinery  for  con- 
trolling the  dangers  attendant  on  the  free  circulation 
of  heresy  and  dangerous  reading  do  its  work  ?     The 
days  when  the  great  aim  was  to  prevent  the  reading 
of  any  heretical  statement    were  very  different  from 
the   present — in  which  practically  many  of  us  must 
know  most  of  what  is  said  against  the  Church  and  the 
faith,  and  our  great  desire  is  to  find  the  most  effective 
antidote.     An  honest  and  able,  though  not  faultless, 
attempt  to  grapple  with  difficulties  may  save  the  faith 
of  many.     If  an  over-scrupulous  theologian  finds  one 
statement   of   doubtful    orthodoxy   in   far    the   ablest 
Catholic  work  on  the  subject,  and  banishes  the  book, 
it  may  well  be  that  the  loss  is  great,  the  gain  infini- 
tesimal.      The    faultlessly    orthodox    works    on    the 
subject — so  pleads  one  whose  faith  is  tried — may  be 
colourless  and  inadequate  ;  excellent  reading  for  those 
who  know  nothing  of  the  difficulties,  worse  than  use- 
less for  those  who  know  much.     The  forbidden  book 
may  be  the  one  useful  one.     This  is  but  one  aspect 
of  a  large  and  important  question. 


THE   CONSERVATIVE   GENIUS   OF  THE   CHURCH     315 

So,  too,  with  the  higher  criticism.  Catholics  cannot 
now  ignore  or  simply  oppose  it.  Its  extremest  con- 
clusions already  stand  condemned  by  Christianity.  It 
now  remains  to  perform  the  second  operation — to 
examine  carefully  and  candidly  what  are  the  true  con- 
clusions to  which  it  should  lead  us.  And  those  who 
are  attempting  this  work  plead  that  for  its  effective 
performance  a  large  measure  of  freedom  for  themselves, 
of  provisional  tolerance  on  the  part  of  theological 
censors,  is  needed. 

One  word  more.  These  and  many  similar 
necessities  press  upon  many  minds  in  England  and 
America  according  as  they  come  into  contact  with  the 
special  problems  concerned.  To  one  man  biblical 
criticism  seems  all  in  all.  To  another  receptiveness 
in  philosophy  appears  most  important ;  to  another  the 
sympathy  of  the  Church  with  the  democracy.  Our 
mixed  populations  belonging  to  many  creeds,  yet  with 
many  common  aims  and  aspirations,  help  to  bring 
about  this  condition  of  things.  The  people  we  meet 
raise  the  questions,  and  we  desire  to  be  able  to  treat 
them  intelligently.  We  know  that  where  Catholics 
live  apart  from  their  neighbours,  such  problems  are 
less  urgent.  What  is  no  irksome  infringement  of  the 
liberty  demanded  for  effectual  action  in  a  Spanish 
Catholic  may  be  so  for  an  educated  Englishman  or 
American.  And  general  rules  from  headquarters 
which  are  obviously  satisfactory  in  one  case  may  be 
unsatisfactory  in  the  other.  In  a  vast  empire  like  the 
Catholic  Church  this  is  at  times  inevitable.  And  it  is 
beyond  doubt  that,  when  rules  do  not  apply  because 
they  were  made  for  other  circumstances,  the  rulers  desire 
full  information  as  to  the  practical  difficulties  of  the 
situation.     Each  man  who  finds  such  rules  practically 


316  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

impossible  to  obey  would  be  urged  by  them  to 
make  representations  to  that  effect  in  the  proper 
quarters. 

And  here  we  find  a  difference  as  to  the  appropriate 
method — a  most  important  difference.  We  may  either 
take  the  view  of  practical  men  :  "  Here  is  a  matter  of 
interest  to  us  all,  to  the  authorities  as  much  as  to 
ourselves.  How  can  we  best  obtain  full  and  fair 
consideration  for  it  ? "  Or  we  may  simply  grumble 
and  abuse  the  authorities  and  the  Church,  and  echo 
the  slanders  of  her  enemies,  without  taking  practical 
steps  to  make  difficulties  understood,  or  reduce  them 
to  their  true  dimensions.  This  is  the  old  programme 
of  the  born  grumbler,  to  bury  his  talent  and  abuse  his 
employer.  "  Lord,  I  knew  that  thou  wert  a  hard 
master."  There  are  constitutional  methods  of  placing 
before  the  authorities  local  and  special  difficulties,  and 
these  are  the  normal  means  of  obtaining  consideration 
for  them.  And  in  what  spirit  should  this  be  done  ? 
Gregorovius,  in  his  great  work  on  Medieval  Rome,  has 
traced — in  pages  which,  in  spite  of  the  writer's  position 
as  external  to  the  Church,  often  make  even  the 
Catholic  reader  realize  its  genius  in  a  new  way — the 
grandeur  and  power  of  that  medieval  Christendom, 
with  Rome  at  its  head,  which  survives  in  the  Catholic 
Church.  The  German  historian  describes  the  Christian 
Commonwealth  as  being  the  lineal  heir  to  some  of  the 
greatest  traditions  of  the  Roman  Empire,  while  it 
replaced  the  guiding  spirit  of  old  Rome  by  the 
Christian  ideal.  And  the  Empire  would  never  have 
been  what  it  was  but  for  the  loyalty  of  its  citizens  and 
their  pride  in  the  city  of  the  Caesars.  "  Civis  Romanics 
sum,"  "  I  am  a  Roman  citizen,"  was  the  basis  of  their 
appeal  where  their  liberty  was  infringed.     But  it  was 


THE  CONSERVATIVE  GENIUS  OF  THE  CHURCH     317 

also  a  symbol  of  proud  devotion  and  of  loyalty  to  the 
city.     And  is  it  too  much  to   hope    that  this  double 
quality  will  always  be  preserved  by  the  citizens  of  the 
greater  Empire  of  the  Catholic  Church  with  Rome  as 
its   head,    with   Christian    enthusiasm   substituted  for 
Pagan   pride  ?     If  a  Roman  citizen  saw  that  a  pro- 
vincial governor  was  about  to  violate  such  liberties  or 
rights  as  the  constitution  allowed  him,  what  was  his 
redress  ?     Did  he  at  once  malign  the  Caesar,  sneer  at 
Roman   greatness,    abuse   the    Roman   people,   unite 
with  the  enemies  of  Rome  and  conspire  against  exist- 
ing authority  ?     If  so,  the  Roman  lictors  would  have 
quickly  ended   his  proceedings  with  their  axes.     On 
the  contrary.     His  first  protest  was  the  expression  of 
pride   in    Rome   and    trust  in  its  protection :    "  Civis 
Romanics  sunt"  "  I  am  a  Roman  citizen."     His  next 
was  an  appeal  to  the  sympathy  and  protection,  not  of 
the  enemies  of  Rome,  but  of  the  Roman  people  and 
their    chief:    "  Appello    Caesar  em ;"    "I    appeal    to 
Caesar."     And   is   it   too   much   to   expect   that   the 
members  of  our  own  Imperial  Church  will  have  at  all 
events   as   much    trust   and   loyalty   as   their    Pagan 
prototypes  ?     Loyalty  and  faith  in  the  representatives 
of  the   Church  on  earth,    trustfulness   that  they  will 
realize  the  ideal  of  their  station,  raises  the  Christian 
people   and  sustains   its  rulers.     Petty   cavilling  and 
criticism   creates   distrust   and   dissension   all   round. 
To  court  the  applause  of  the  enemies  of  the  Church 
by   abusing   its   authorities   is    unworthy  of  the  best 
Roman  as  of  the  best  Christian  traditions. 

Emergencies  may  arise  in  times  of  transition.  It 
may  be  lawful — it  may  be  a  duty  on  special  occasions 
— to  urge  special  or  local  necessities  or  to  bring  before 
those   in   authority   the   practical   difficulties    of    the 


318  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

situation.  But  a  Catholic's  final  duty  is  to  obey 
authority  in  its  rightful  sphere.  And  at  whatever 
cost  it  should  be  his  pride.  If  we  desire  the  law  to 
respect  our  liberties,  we  must  ourselves  respect  the 
law.  Justice  may  miscarry.  Or  he  who  has  urged 
the  difficulties  of  the  situation,  and  its  requirements, 
may  have  been  unwise  or  wrong.  In  any  case,  the 
ground  of  his  appeal  is  the  ground  of  his  submission  : 
"  Civis  Romanus  sum,"  "  I  am  a  Catholic." 


XI 


ST.  THOMAS  AQUINAS  AND 
MEDIEVAL  THOUGHT 

A  learned  Jesuit ■  once  drew  a  very  attractive 
picture  of  a  Catholic  University  which  should  fulfil 
the  functions  of  "a  sort  of  boundary  commission 
of  physicists,  historians,  critics,  philosophers  and 
theologians,  working  with  a  common  endeavour  for 
the  provisional  adjustment  of  the  contested  frontier  " 
between  all  these  sciences  at  their  present  stage  of 
development.  There  is  no  doubt  that  many  learned 
men  would  welcome  an  institution  with  the  functions 
and  the  authoritative  status  which  these  words  imply. 
We  suffer  from  the  fact  that  this  effort,  so  strenuously 
made  in  the  thirteenth  century,  has  never  since  been 
repeated  with  the  same  frankness  or  thoroughness. 
Consequently  theological  science,  then  developed  with 
the  aid  of  the  best  secular  thought  and  learning  of 
the  time,  and  handed  down  with  comparatively  little 
change  to  our  own  day,  is  now  in  some  danger  of 
being  cramped  by  the  very  elements  that  once  gave 
it  living  relations  with  its  intellectual  environment  ; 
and  we  are  apt  to  regard  some  of  the  peculiarities 
of  form,  which  it  then  for  the  first  time  assumed,  as 
part  of  its  unchanging  essence. 

1  Father  Rickaby,  in  the  Introduction  to  his  translation  of  St.  Thomas 
Aquinas's  Sitmrna  contra  Gentiles. 


320  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

Yet  if  we  read  the  great  thirteenth-century  school- 
men with  an  eye  to  the  conditions  in  which  they 
wrote,  we  cannot  but  see  in  their  work — and  notably 
in  the  works  of  St.  Thomas  Aquinas — a  protest 
against  this  very  tendency  to  petrifaction  to  which 
all  intellectual  systems  are  liable  when  their  original 
meaning  and  purpose  are  forgotten.  Aquinas  was 
essentially  a  writer  for  an  emergency.  And  the 
emergency  for  which  he  wrote  was  in  some  respects 
very  similar  to  that  which  we  have  to  face  in  our 
own  day,  in  others,  utterly  dissimilar.  Regarded  from 
the  point  of  view  of  his  method  of  dealing  with  the 
problems  of  the  hour,  St.  Thomas  Aquinas  is  in  some 
respects  unrivalled  and  a  veritable  model  for  ourselves. 
"His  marvellous  grasp  and  subtlety  of  intellect  seem 
to  me  to  be  almost  without  a  parallel,"  writes  a 
modern  thinker,  so  far  removed  from  the  Saint's 
standpoint  as  Huxley.1  But  in  the  actual  problems 
demanding  attention  two  centuries  could  hardly  be 
further  apart  than  the  thirteenth  and  the  nineteenth. 
The  Summa  contra  Gentiles  is  believed  to  be  largely 
a  resume  of  lectures  delivered  in  the  University  of 
Paris  about  the  year  1 260.  The  intellectual  conditions 
of  that  time  are  familiar  to  students  of  its  history. 
But  they  must  be  recalled  and  kept  clearly  in  mind 
by  the  general  reader  who  wishes  to  appreciate  the 
qualities  of  the  book  and  its  lesson  for  us. 

In  spite  of  the  difference  between  the  actual 
problems  debated,  there  were  points  of  significant 
similarity  between  certain  mental  tendencies  and 
social  forces  at  work  in  the  thirteenth  and  in  the 
nineteenth  centuries.  The  Oxford  of  the  last  century 
witnessed  a  very  interesting  struggle  between  the 
1  Science  and  Morals^  p.  142.    Macmillan. 


ST.  THOMAS  AQUINAS  AND  MEDIEVAL  THOUGHT    321 

upholders  of  what  used  to  be  called  "  liberalism  "  in 
religious  thought,  or  a  modified  rationalism,  and  the 
conservative  adherents  of  tradition.  There  were  on 
either  side  men  of  veritable  genius.  Whately  and 
Arnold,  and  later  on  more  unmistakably  Jowett,  Mark 
Pattison,  and  Matthew  Arnold,  were  the  precursors 
of  the  liberal  theology  of  to-day  and  the  ancestors  of 
those  critical  students  of  Christian  "  origins  "  and  of 
the  Bible  itself,  who  are  now  exercising  so  great  an 
influence. 

Yet  more  marked  was  the  genius  of  the  leader 
of  the  conservative  school  in  Oxford — John  Henry 
Newman,  who,  following  in  the  footsteps  of  Edmund 
Burke,  defended  the  ancient  ways  against  the  acuter 
intellects  of  the  hour.  He  upheld  tradition  and 
dogma  as  representing  the  wisdom  inherited  from 
our  ancestors,  the  communication  of  rays  of  divine 
light  to  the  prophets  of  old,  and  a  message  from 
One  in  whom  the  divine  nature  had  become  in- 
carnate. 

And  Oxford,  the  microcosm,  reflected  in  this  battle 
England,  the  macrocosm.  Every  thinking  man  in  the 
'thirties  and  'forties  was  in  philosophy  (according  to 
the  testimony  of  J.  S.  Mill)  a  Benthamite,  belonging 
to  the  school  of  progress,  or  a  Coleridgian,  who 
upheld  and  analyzed  the  wisdom  contained  in  the 
sacred  traditions  of  the  race. 

Two  tendencies,  largely  similar,  were  quite  unmis- 
takable in  the  thought  of  the  twelfth  and  thirteenth 
centuries,  and  they  are  described  with  much  picturesque 
detail  and  wealth  of  erudition,  if  not  quite  with  critical 
accuracy  or  with  the  precision  which  needs  a  philo- 
sophical specialist,  by  the  late  Archbishop  Vaughan, 
the  author  of  the  admirable  Life  and  Labours  of  St. 

Y 


322  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

Thomas  of  Aguin.1  True,  indeed,  the  theological 
liberalism  of  the  Middle  Ages  was  not  allied,  like 
that  of  our  own  day,  with  historical  and  biblical 
criticism  and  inductive  science.  But  both  forms  of 
liberalism  were  attempts  to  carry  into  the  domain  of 
religious  inquiry  and  faith  those  methods  of  reasoning 
which  are  applicable  only  to  the  regions  of  experience. 
The  monastic  school,  represented  by  St.  Bernard 
and  by  Hugh  of  St.  Victor,  appealed,  much  as  the 
school  of  Coleridge  did,  to  the  spiritual  "taste"  and 
instinct,  as  the  true  faculty  whereby  the  inscrutable 
things  of  God  are  apprehended.  Scholastic  subtleties 
were  abjured  by  them  as  irreverent  and  unprofitable. 
The  things  of  God  were  too  vast  for  the  poor 
measuring  tape  of  the  human  intellect.  Faith  was 
needed  for  their  apprehension.  Abelard,  on  the  other 
hand,  from  his  Chair  in  the  University  of  Paris, 
applied  his  acute  dialectic  to  all  things.  Reason 
must,  he  argued,  precede  faith,  lest  faith  should  be 
irrational.  Reason  again  was  invoked  to  investigate 
theological  mystery  itself,  and  the  Trinity  was  made 
a  subject  for  philosophical  debate.  He  attempted  to 
find  a  rational  solution  of  all  the  minute  questions 
which  the  imaginative  brains  of  subtle  and  sceptical 
inquirers  could  formulate,  in  place  of  setting  them 
aside — with  the  mystics — as  belonging  to  a  region 
above  the  reach  of  the  human  intellect.  Describing 
to  a  Roman  cardinal  the  Paris  of  Peter  Abelard,  St. 
Bernard  writes  :  "  Along  the  streets  and  in  the  squares 
people  dispute  about  the  Catholic  faith,  about  the 
Child-bearing  of  the  Virgin,  about  the  sacrament  of 
the  altar  and  about  the  incomparable  mystery  of  the 

i  The  author,  Dom  Roger  Bede  Vaughan,  a  brother  of  the  late 
Cardinal,  was  afterwards  Archbishop  of  Sydney. 


ST.  THOMAS  AQUINAS  AND  MEDIEVAL  THOUGHT    323 

Trinity." 1  The  Oxford  liberals  of  the  'fifties  and 
'sixties  liberalized  theology  by  rationalizing  it.  And 
so  did  Abelard  after  the  manner  of  his  time,  although 
he  did  not  invoke  in  the  process,  as  did  the  Essayists 
and  Reviewers,  or  Matthew  Arnold  and  Arthur  Clough, 
the  conclusions  of  an  historical  science  which  was 
unknown  to  the  Middle  Ages. 

The  mottoes  of  either  school  in  the  twelfth  century 
might  have  been  taken  without  change  by  their  nine- 
teenth-century successors.  The  one  freely  quoted 
from  Isaias  the  words,  u  Unless  ye  shall  believe,  ye 
shall  not  understand ; "  the  other  from  Ecclesiastes, 
"He  who  believes  quickly  is  light  of  heart  and  shall 
be  worsted."  In  each  period  there  were  the  com- 
promises of  those  who  saw  elements  of  truth  in  both 
tendencies.  Peter  Lombard,  the  pupil  of  Abelard, 
learnt  also  from  the  mystic  pages  of  Hugh  of  St. 
Victor.  So,  too,  Arnold  was  influenced  by  Keble. 
And  later  on  rationalism  and  idealism  combined  in 
Thomas  Hill  Green,  whose  influence  in  return  reacted 
upon  such  successors  of  the  Tractarians  as  Gore  and 
Scott  Holland.  There  were  also,  at  both  periods,  the 
extremes  of  the  ultra-logical  who  passed  on  the  one 
side  into  obscurantism,  on  the  other  into  Agnosticism 
or  Pantheism. 

As  time  went  on,  indeed,  in  both  cases  the 
prophecies  of  the  conservatives  as  to  the  dangers  of 
liberalism  were  verified.  The  mildly  liberal  theology 
of  Thomas  Arnold  developed  into  the  rationalism  of 
his  son  ;  and  St.  Bernard's  warning,  too,  as  to  the 
tendency  of  the  dialectical  method  of  Abelard  seemed 
to  be  realized.  The  flood  of  new  ideas,  to  which  the 
introduction  of  the  Arabian  and  Jewish  philosophies 

1  Works  of  St.  Bernard,  ii.  863.     Hodges. 


324  MEN  AND    MATTERS 

and  of  the  translations  of  Aristotle's  physical  and 
metaphysical  works  led  in  the  thirteenth  century, 
gave  a  strong  anti-Christian  direction  to  this  method. 
The  cultivation  of  the  new  learning,  added  to  the 
unrestrained  excesses  of  the  fashionable  dialectical 
tournaments,  led,  among  thinkers,  to  an  extensive 
abandonment  of  Christianity  and  of  Monotheism  itself. 
The  general  unsettlement  it  produced  was  somewhat 
analogous  to  the  disturbing  effect,  during  the  first  fifty 
years  and  more,  of  the  flood  of  new  discoveries  in 
physical  and  historical  science.  Averroes,  the 
Pantheist,  had  disciples  in  the  university  chairs  in 
Paris  during  the  space  of  half  a  century.  The 
"  liberal "  tendency  triumphed.  The  authority  of 
Aristotle  reigned  supreme,  and  he  was  interpreted 
largely  by  the  light  of  pantheistic  Arabian  com- 
mentaries, and  of  mistranslations  which  favoured  such 
misinterpretation. 

The  medieval  schools  [writes  Cardinal  Newman]  were  the 
arena  of  as  critical  a  struggle  between  truth  and  error  as 
Christianity  has  ever  endured  ;  and  the  philosophy  which 
bears  their  name  carried  its  supremacy  by  means  of  a  suc- 
cession of  victories  in  the  cause  of  the  Church.  Scarcely  had 
universities  risen  into  popularity,  when  they  were  found  to 
be  infected  with  the  most  subtle  and  fatal  forms  of  unbelief ; 
and  the  heresies  of  the  East  germinated  in  the  West  of 
Europe  and  in  Catholic  lecture-rooms  with  a  mysterious 
vigour  upon  which  history  throws  little  light.  The  questions 
agitated  were  as  deep  as  any  in  theology ;  the  being  and  essence 
of  the  Almighty  were  the  main  subjects  of  the  disputation, 
and  Aristotle  was  introduced  to  the  ecclesiastical  youth  as  a 
teacher  of  Pantheism.  Saracenic  expositions  of  the  great 
philosopher  were  in  vogue  ;  and  when  a  fresh  treatise  was 
imported  from  Constantinople  the  curious  and  impatient 
threw  himself  upon  it,  regardless  of  the  Church's  warnings,  and 


ST.  THOMAS  AQUINAS  AND  MEDIEVAL  THOUGHT    325 

reckless  of  the  effect  upon  his  own  mind.  The  acutest  intel- 
lects became  sceptics  and  misbelievers ;  and  the  head  of  the 
Holy  Roman  Empire,  the  Caesar  Frederick  the  Second,  to 
say  nothing  of  our  miserable  King  John,  had  the  reputation 
of  meditating  a  profession  of  Mahometanism.  It  is  said  that, 
in  the  community  at  large,  men  had  a  vague  suspicion  and 
mistrust  of  each  other's  belief  in  Revelation.1 

We  are  rightly  anxious  in  our  own  day  for  a 
Christian  and  Catholic  atmosphere  in  our  own 
universities,  and  so  we  can  sympathize  with  the 
distress  of  the  rulers  of  the  Church  at  what  they 
witnessed  in  Paris  in  the  ages  of  Faith.  University 
professors  taught  that  incarnations  of  the  Divinity 
were  many,  or  that  the  resurrection  of  the  body  and 
even  immortality  were  incredible  ;  or,  by  a  blend  of 
pantheism  with  positivism,  that  God  was  identical 
with  creatures  or  with  the  creation,2  or  that  Christian 
theology  was  based  on  fables.  Certainly  no  positions 
more  destructive  of  orthodox  Christian  faith  have 
been  upheld  in  our  own  day  by  rationalistic  critics  in 
England,  or  in  Germany.  The  religious  scepticism 
and  eclecticism  which  Mark  Pattison  describes  in  his 
Memoirs  as  attending  on  the  triumph  of  liberalism  in 
the  Oxford  of  the  'fifties — when  men  "  questioned 
everything  and  were  impatient  to  throw  the  whole 
cargo  of  tradition  overboard  " — was  no  whit  greater 
than  that  which  characterized  the  Paris  of  the  early 
thirteenth  century,  and  it  was  less  openly  avowed. 
There  was,  however,  this  difference — that  the  educated 

1  Idea  of  a  University,  by  J.  H.  Newman,  p.  383. 

2  See  Gerson's  testimony  in  De  Concordia  Metaphysicae  cum  Logica, 
iv.  Compare  also  Ueberweg's  History  of  Philosophy  (English  trans- 
lation), i.  p.  431  ;  and  Vaughan's  St.  Thomas  of  Aquin  (Longmans),  i., 
p.  406. 


326  MEN  AND   AfATTERS 

classes  in  the  Middle  Ages  bore  a  far  smaller  proportion 
to  the  whole  population,  and  the  danger  was  conse- 
quently less  universal. 

Authority,  too,  played  its  role  in  both  cases.  At 
Oxford  there  were  the  condemnations  of  excesses  on 
both  sides — in  1836  and  1845.  ^n  Pans,  also,  the 
vagaries  of  mysticism  were  branded  in  David  of 
Dinanto,  and  those  of  rationalism  in  the  followers  of 
Averroes.  The  mode  of  procedure  was,  however, 
different.  The  "deprivation"  of  Dr.  Hampden  and 
the  "degradation"  of  Mr.  Ward  by  convocation  were 
the  attenuated  survivals  of  a  modus  operandi  which  had 
been  extremely  drastic  in  the  Middle  Ages,  if  not  always 
in  the  long  run  effectual.  Amalric  of  Bena,  as  pro- 
fessor of  logic  and  theology,  had  taught  free  doctrines 
on  the  Incarnation.  They  took  the  form  of  excess, 
and  not  defect.  That  God  the  Son  became  incarnate 
in  Christ,  he  willingly  admitted.  But  so,  too,  he 
taught,  had  the  Eternal  Father  been  already  incarnate 
in  Abraham,  while  the  Holy  Ghost  was  still  making 
the  whole  human  race  incarnate  gods.1  Amalric  went 
to  his  account  in  1207.  But  his  doctrines  spread,  and 
authority  driven  to  bay  acted  decisively.  Peter  of 
Corbeil,  Bishop  of  Paris,  convened  a  Council  in  1209. 
Amalric's  teaching  was  examined  and  condemned. 
His  bones  were  dragged  from  their  resting-place  in 
consecrated  ground,  and  carted  off  to  an  unhallowed 
grave.  A  fire  was  then  lighted  in  the  city,  in  which 
ten  of  his  most  prominent  disciples — some  of  them 
priests — were  burned  alive. 

The  intellectual  evils  of  the  University  were  traced 
by  the  authorities  largely  to  the  influence  of  Aristotle's 

1  See  analysis  of  his  doctrine  in  Ueberweg's  History  of  Philosophy 
(English  translation),  i.,  p.  431. 


ST.   THOMAS  AQUINAS  AND  MEDIEVAL  THOUGHT    327 

Physics,  and  the  Council  issued  an  edict  that  they  were 
not  to  be  further  read,  publicly  or  privately. 

It  is  a  curious  illustration  of  the  obstinacy  of  human 
thought  at  a  time  of  intellectual  agitation,  that  these 
drastic  measures  failed.  Not  even  the  fear  of  being 
burned  alive  could  stop  the  speculations  of  the  eager 
philosophers,  and  the  positions  upheld  by  professors  in 
the  succeeding  years  were  quite  as  unorthodox  as  those 
of  Amalric.  Though,  in  1215,  Robert  de  Coupon, 
papal  legate,  supplemented  the  work  of  the  Paris 
Council  by  condemning  Aristotle's  metaphysical  works 
and  prohibiting  their  use,  yet  the  succeeding  years 
witnessed  teaching  as  rationalistic  as  did  the  beginning 
of  the  century.  Archbishop  Vaughan  has  collected  the 
propositions  advanced  by  the  heterodox,  and  protested 
against  by  the  orthodox,  and  his  pages  are  very 
instructive  reading. 

In  the  intellectual  world  it  soon  ceased  to  be  a 
struggle  between  the  two  methods ;  for  the  dialectical 
method  had  triumphed.  Aristotle  had  acquired  an 
authority  which  could  not  be  gainsaid.  The  Arabian 
and  Jewish  philosophers — Avicenna,  Averroes,  Mai- 
monides  and  the  rest — were  recognized  powers,  and 
no  one  who  did  not  appreciate  and  understand  their 
philosophy  could  exert  intellectual  influence  on  the 
rising  generation,  any  more  than  a  man  could  gain 
attention  at  Oxford  or  Cambridge  as  a  competent 
professor  of  philosophy,  who  did  not  know  and  treat 
with  respect  the  writings  of  Kant  or  Hegel.  So  long 
as  the  existing  intellectual  fashion  lasted,  no  philo- 
sophical teacher  could  revert  to  the  attitude  of 
St.  Bernard,  for  whom  non-Christian  philosophers 
were  simply  ministers  of  evil.  The  practical  alter- 
native lay  between  quitting  the  world  of  thought,  as 


328  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

too  far  gone  in  perverse  ways  for  remedy,  or  going 
fully  into  contemporary  controversies,  adopting  the 
dialectical  method  which  had  prevailed,  and  treating 
respectfully  the  philosophers  whose  credit  stood  so 
high.  The  first  alternative  meant  simply  to  leave 
alone  questions  which  were  crying  aloud  for  an  answer, 
for  it  was  quite  clear  that,  in  spite  of  excesses,  there 
were  deep  and  true  philosophical  thoughts  in  the 
writings  both  of  Aristotle  and  of  the  Arabians. 

The  conservatives  did  adopt  the  policy  of  simple 
abstention,  and  denounced  not  only  the  excesses  to 
which  the  new  methods  led,  but  the  methods  them- 
selves. They  still  held  power  and  influence,  but 
hardly  in  the  world  of  thought.  Even  St.  Bonaven- 
ture,  whose  whole  temper  of  mind  was  mystical,  was 
largely  scholastic  in  method.  The  opposition  to  Aris- 
totle's metaphysics  and  the  dialectical  method,  where 
it  was  thorough-going,  had  now  become  simply  the 
attitude  of  practical  men,  who  saw  faith  being  shaken 
by  the  intellectual  ferment,  but  were  not  alive  to  the 
intellectual  problems  at  issue.  It  was  the  conservative 
opposition,  on  the  part  of  men  of  action,  to  the  dangers 
incident  to  intellectual  life.  It  lasted  through  the 
lifetime  of  St.  Thomas,  and  gave  an  expiring  kick  after 
his  death.  Some  years  after  that  event — on  March  7, 
1277 — another  Bishop  of  Paris  sat  in  judgment  on 
the  evil  ways  of  the  University  which  Bishop  Corbeil 
had  denounced  in  1209,  and  condemned  many  pro- 
positions advocated  by  those  who  adopted  the  new 
learning  and  methods,  including  three  which  were 
taught  by  M  Frater  Thomas "  himself.  Albert  the 
Great,  now  an  old  man  of  more  than  eighty  years  of 
age,  came  from  Cologne  to  defend  his  friend's  memory 
and  avert  the  indignity  of  a  condemnation,  but  to  no 


ST.  THOMAS  AQUINAS  AND  MEDIEVAL  THOUGHT    329 

purpose.  The  censure  was  passed,  and  not  repealed 
until  nearly  fifty  years  later.  It  was  endorsed  in  the 
following  year  (1278)  in  England,  by  Archbishop  Kil- 
wardby  of  Canterbury,  himself  a  Dominican  Friar.1 

But,  as  I  have  just  indicated,  the  plan  of  accept- 
ing the  new  methods  and  authorities  was  tried  by  St. 
Thomas,  and  with  success.  An  Englishman,  Alex- 
ander of  Hales,  the  first  friar  to  teach  in  the  Uni- 
versity of  Paris,  was  the  pioneer  in  this  movement  of 
reconciliation.  He  was  acquainted  with  the  whole  of 
the  works  of  Aristotle,  and  he  adopted  in  his  lectures 
the  dialectical  form,  and  the  statement  of  arguments 
pro  and  con  for  each  proposition.  This  was  to 
abandon  the  old  rhetorical  exposition  of  earlier  days. 
Alexander  died  in  1245.  Albertus  Magnus,  the 
master  of  St.  Thomas,  took  a  similar  line,  and  was 
the  first  scholastic  to  introduce  Aristotle's  philosophy 
into  theology.  In  spite  of  strong  opposition,  this  plan 
of  action  did  eventually  stem  in  Paris  the  tide  of  ultra- 
rationalism  and  licence  of  thought,  which  mere  repres- 
sion had  been  unable  to  arrest.  The  new  generation 
found,  especially  in  the  works  of  Albertus  and  St. 
Thomas,  a  defence  of  Christian  dogma  which  took 
account  of  all  that  was  fascinating  and  persuasive  in 
the  intellectual  life  of  the  day.  They  were  not  called 
upon  to  renounce  those  methods  which  the  world  of 
thought  universally  accepted.  Aristotle's  Metaphysics 
were  no  longer  proscribed,  but  on  the  contrary  are  to 
be  found  in  1254  on  the  official  list  of  works  required 
to  be  taught  by  the  Facultas  Arthim^  And  gradu- 
ally the  intellectual  chaos  was  reduced  to  cosmos. 

1  See  Lagrange's  Historical  Criticism  and  the  Old  Testament  (English 
translation),  Catholic  Truth  Society,  p.  24.  See  also  Revue  du  Clerge" 
Franqais,  15  Juillet,  1905,  p.  405. 

2  See  Ueberweg,  i.,  p.  432. 


33°  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

This  policy  of  reconciliation  between  the  new 
learning  and  the  theology  of  the  Fathers  was,  as  I 
have  said,  adopted  by  St.  Thomas'  master  at  Cologne 
and  Paris,  Albertus  Magnus,  a  fascinating  figure  in 
medieval  history,  a  man  of  encyclopedic  learning  and 
a  devotee  of  physical  science  as  well  as  of  metaphysics, 
an  architect,  a  botanist,  a  mineralogist  as  well  as  a 
theologian.  He  was  "a  man  so  God-like  in  all 
science,"  writes  his  contemporary,  Engelbert,  "  that 
he  may  suitably  be  called  the  wonder  and  miracle  of 
our  time."  Albertus  was  born  in  1193,1  and  was  con- 
sequently just  twenty  at  the  critical  time,  to  which  we 
have  referred,  when  the  University  of  Paris  seemed  to 
be  drifting  away  from  Christian  influences  altogether. 
He  outlived  St.  Thomas,  dying  in  1280  at  the  age  of 
eighty-seven,  when  the  long  battle  was  practically 
won,  and  the  new  synthesis  was  gaining  the  assured 
position  visible  in  the  pages  of  Dante  twenty  years 
later.  The  learned  Benedictine  biographer  of  St. 
Thomas  thus  describes  the  views  and  work  of  Albertus 
Magnus : 

There  is  no  doubt  [writes  Archbishop  Vaughan]  that 
Albert  took  a  wide  and  profound  view  of  the  conditions  of  the 
intellectual  world  of  his  day.  A  man  does  not  labour  as  he 
laboured,  nor  strike  out  a  novel  course  of  teaching  with  the 
likelihood  of  being  misunderstood,  without  having  a  grave 
reason  for  doing  so.  The  very  task  which  he  set  himself  to 
accomplish  points  to  the  depth  and  the  wisdom  of  his  appre- 
ciation of  the  times.  He  saw  clearly  the  immense  influence 
which  had  been  and  still  was  being  exerted  by  those  vast 
intellectual  powers  represented  by  the  Koran,  the  Talmud 
and  the  Stagyrite.  Much  truth  thrown  into  philosophic  form 
was  on  the  side  of  the  enemy.  The  power  of  the  Greek 
thought,  its  precision,  its  clearness,  its  order,  its  logical  force, 

1  Some  authorities,  however,  place  his  birth  thirteen  years  later. 


ST.  THOMAS  AQUINAS  AND  MEDIEVAL  THOUGHT    331 

together  with  the  traditionary  teachings  of  men  of  intelligence 
as  subtle  as  profound,  could  always  make  a  respectable 
appearance  and  often  confuse  those  who  were  really  seeking 
after  truth,  and  keep  them  from  perceiving  clearly  the  philo- 
sophy and  beauty  of  the  Christian  religion.  ...  It  was  not 
without  causing  astonishment,  and  I  may  say  not  without 
some  scandal,  that  Albert  set  about  his  great  work  of  bringing 
Aristotle  into  the  midst  of  Christianity.  Had  he  contented 
himself  with  hunting  up  old  manuscripts,  with  laboriously 
searching  out  the  true  text,  and  still  more  laboriously  per- 
haps, eliciting  the  true  meaning,  by  comparing  one  execrable 
translation  from  the  Arabic,  with  a  still  more  execrable 
translation  from  the  Greek ;  or,  failing  this,  by  comparing 
one  part  of  the  author  with  another,  or  with  Theophrastus  or 
Avicenna,  men  might  simply  have  wondered  at  the  extra- 
ordinary hobby  of  an  industrious  bookworm.  But  he  did  far 
more  than  this :  he  actually  had  the  boldness  to  modify  and 
mould  Aristotle,  by  the  light  of  Christian  principles,  into  a 
Christian  form,  to  be  set  before  Christian  men  as  Christian 
philosophy.  And  what  is  more,  he  made  use  of  the  position 
he  occupied  of  Public  Professor  of  Theology  and  Philosophy 
to  instil  his  novel  views  into  the  minds  of  the  rising  genera- 
tion. Never  before  this  had  Aristotle  been  made  the  special 
subject-matter  for  lectures  in  the  schools.1 

Archbishop  Vaughan  does  not  fail  to  note  the 
fierce  protests  made  in  the  name  of  orthodoxy  against 
Albertus'  respectful  treatment  of  the  non-Christian 
philosophers  —  Jews,  Mahometans,  Pantheists  —  and 
especially   of    Aristotle.      "Albert   has,"    he   writes, 

1  The  fame  of  Albert  was  so  far  more  universal  than  that  of  Alexander 
of  Hales  that  this  passage  probably  represents  truly  the  effect  of  Albert's 
teaching.  Moreover,  Albert  adopted  Aristotle  more  completely  than  did 
the  Englishman.  But,  as  I  have  said,  the  old  uncompromising  opposition 
to  Aristotle  had  already  been  dropped  by  Alexander,  and  the  dialectical 
method  substituted  for  the  more  oratorical  method  of  earlier  times. 
Alexander  was  the  master  of  St.  Bonaventure.  See  Vacant's  Dictionnaire 
de  la  Thiologie  Catholique  (Paris,  Letouzey),  articles  "  Albert  le  Grand  " 
and  "  Alexander  de  Hales." 


332  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

"been  accused  over  and  over  again  of  'introducing 
the  philosophy  of  Aristotle  into  the  very  sanctuary  of 
Christ,'  of  'allotting  to  him  the  principal  seat  in  the 
middle  of  Christ's  temple ' ;  of  being  drunk  with  the 
wine  of  secular  science,  human  wisdom  and  profane 
philosophy  ;  of  uniting  contentious,  thorny  and  garru- 
lous dialectics  with  most  sacred  and  pure  theology, 
and  of  teaching  his  followers  a  new  and  philosophic 
method  of  explaining  and  teaching  the  Holy  Word. 
He  has  been  called  '  an  ape'  and  'an  ass' ;  has  been 
accused  of  sorcery  and  of  witchcraft." 

The  great  Dominican  persevered  in  his  efforts  in 
spite  of  these  charges  against  his  orthodoxy,  and  in 
the  early  'forties  of  the  century  he  first  came  to  know 
the  man  who  was  to  continue  and  complete  his  work. 

The  Dominicans  had  been  established  at  Cologne 
over  twenty  years  when  St.  Thomas  went  there  to 
attend  the  lectures  of  Albertus.1  In  1245  master  and 
pupil  passed  on  to  Paris,  where  Albertus  was  to 
occupy  the  professor's  chair  and  don  the  doctor's  cap. 
Already  in  1228  Albertus  had  been  (according  to 
Archbishop  Vaughan)  invited  to  reform  the  intel- 
lectual condition  of  the  University,  and  his  second 
visit  saw  the  continuation  of  this  work.  St.  Thomas 
took  his  Bachelor's  degree  in  1248,  and  his  duties  at 
once  included  public  addresses  and  disputations.  His 
best  early  biographer,  William  de  Tocco,  describes 
his  whole  method  as  novel.  There  were  '*  new  pro- 
positions," a  "new  and  clear  method  of  deciding  ques- 
tions," "new  reasons,"  "new  opinions."2  Eventually 
St.    Thomas   occupied    the    professor's   chair   in   the 

1  I  adopt  Archbishop  Vaughan's  chronology. 

2  "A.SS.  VII  Martii  (i,  661,  F.)  n.  15  apud  Mandonnet,  Siger  de 
Brabant,  et  l'Averroisme  Latin  au  XIII  siecle,  p.  Ixi  (Freiburg,  1903)." 


ST.  THOMAS  AQUINAS  AND  MEDIEVAL  THOUGHT    333 

University  more  than  once ;  and,  as  I  have  already 
said,  the  Sutnma  contra  Gentiles  is  believed  to  be 
based  on  lectures  delivered  before  the  University 
in  1260. 

The  reader  who  approaches  the  work  with  a  mind 
fashioned  by  modern  literature  and  philosophy  cannot 
fail,  I  think,  to  be  struck  by  two  things — first,  the 
extraordinary  balance  of  mind,  breadth  of  view,  and 
absence  of  undue  prepossession  with  which  the  Saint 
approaches  the  questions  of  which  he  treats  ;  but, 
secondly,  the  marked  peculiarities  in  the  intellectual 
conditions  of  the  time  which  determined  the  subjects 
chosen  for  discussion.  The  new  method  exactly 
fulfilled  the  definition  of  liberalism  by  its  chief 
opponent  at  Oxford  in  the  last  century, — as  the 
exercise  of  thought  where  "  thought  could  not  be 
brought  to  a  successful  issue."  The  old  method  of 
the  Christian  Fathers  had  been  one  of  intellectual 
self-restraint  in  matters  divine.  The  things  of  God 
were  seen  "  through  a  glass  darkly, "  and  human  reason 
could  not  scrutinize  them.  The  Fathers  had  ever 
remembered  the  warning  of  St.  Irenaeus  against  the 
Gnostics — that  the  inquisitiveness  of  the  human  reason 
in  matters  which  are  above  it  is  waste  of  time  and  can 
lead  to  no  good  result ;  that  God  knows,  but  man  can 
never  know.  Speaking  of  the  monastic  Platonism 
which  long  contested  the  ground  with  scholastic  Aris- 
totelianism,  Archbishop  Vaughan  says  that  its  devotee 
"  would  prefer,  if  he  could  help  it,  not  to  analyze,  not 
to  discuss,  rather  to  push  forward  in  knowledge  that 
his  love  might  be  stronger."  Even  Anselm,  the  first 
of  the  scholastics,  had  held  to  this  principle  in  his 
Cur  Deus  Homo?  "The  right  order  of  things 
demands  that  we  shall  believe  the  deep  things  of  the 


334  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

Christian  faith  before  presuming  to  discuss  them  by 
reason,"  he  writes ;  and  he  maintains  that  the  intellect 
may  often  fail,  even  after  its  best  endeavours,  to  reach 
the  heights  visible  to  the  glance  of  faith.  Very 
different  was  the  temper  of  the  later  twelfth  and 
earlier  thirteenth  centuries,  which  has  so  often  been 
compared  in  acuteness  and  in  universal  inquisitiveness 
to  that  of  a  clever  child.  This  temper,  which  com- 
pletely prevailed  after  the  dialectical  method  had 
become  rampant  in  the  early  years  of  the  thirteenth 
century,  led  to  the  formulation  of  some  answer  on 
every  question  propounded  in  the  schools.  The 
public  disputations  made  this  course  a  necessity. 
There  was  no  limit  set  to  the  questions  which  a 
disputant  might  raise  or  the  difficulties  he  might  pro- 
pose. And  every  question  demanded  an  answer, 
every  difficulty  a  solution.  If  he  failed  to  reply 
explicitly,  the  defender  of  the  thesis  was  defeated. 
The  critical  reader  feels  even  in  the  Stmima  contra 
Gentiles — though  far  more  in  the  later  Summa  Theo- 
logica — that  if  the  questions  were  to  be  answered 
categorically,  it  is  hardly  conceivable  that  they  should 
be  better  solved  than  they  are  by  St.  Thomas  of 
Aquin.  But  some  of  them  are  questions  to  which, 
neither  in  the  days  of  St.  Irenaeus,  nor  in  the  days  of 
St.  Bernard,  nor  in  our  own  time,  a  categorical  answer 
would  have  been  attempted.  Even  since  Abelard's 
day  the  general  confidence  in  the  powers  of  the 
syllogism  and  in  dialectic  had  very  considerably  grown, 
and  it  now  amounted  to  a  superstition. 

If,  as  Schlegel  tells  us,1  men  were  beginning  to 
hope  to  discover  the  secrets  of  natural  science  by  dint 

1  See  Philosophy  of  History  (Bohn's  translation),  p.  376 :  "  A  hope 
was  secretly  entertained  that  by  the  pretended  magical  power  of  these 


ST.  THOMAS  AQUINAS  AND  MEDIEVAL  THOUGHT    335 

of  syllogistic  reasoning,  we  can  understand  that  to 
decline  the  logical  combat  on  any  question,  was 
regarded  as  an  obscurantist  mistrust  of  the  great 
intellectual  instrument  of  the  time. 

These  considerations  must  be  borne  in  mind  if  we 
would  account  for  the  contrast  between  the  persuasive- 
ness of  St.  Thomas'  treatment  of  some  of  the  funda- 
mental questions  which  belong  to  all  times,  and  the 
sense  of  inconclusiveness  which  will  arise  in  the  typical 
modern  reader  as  he  peruses  some  of  the  fanciful  and 
subtle  arguments  on  contemporary  discussions.  The 
problems  with  which  these  attempt  to  deal  were, 
doubtless,  often  raised  by  ingenious  devil's  advocates 
in  the  public  debates  then  in  fashion. 

Even  the  Agnostic  of  the  twentieth  century  cannot 
read  without  a  strong  impression  of  candour,  and 
width  and  grasp  of  mind,  such  a  chapter  as  that  on 
the  necessity  of  teaching  definite  Theism  among  the 
articles  of  Faith.  St.  Thomas  holds,  we  need  not 
say,  that  the  existence  of  God  is  the  only  truly 
rational  explanation  of  the  world,  and  can  be  estab- 
lished by  right  reason  apart  from  Faith.  But  living  as 
he  did  in  a  University  where  many  professors  upheld  a 
philosophy  which  taught  that  God  was  the  world,  and 
that  there  is  no  God  at  all  in  the  Christian  sense,  and 
who  invoked  on  their  behalf  the  authority  of  thinkers 
of  world-wide  reputation,  St.  Thomas  treats  the 
philosophic  aspect  of  the  question  with  all  the  modera- 
tion of  an  educated  man  of  our  own  day.  Doubtless, 
philosophical  reason  rightly  used  does  eventually  lead 
to  Theism ;  but  it  is  desirable,  he  argues,  in  practice 
that  the  doctrine  should  be  taught  per  modum  fidei, 

logical  devices  one  might  learn  and  obtain  the  mastery  of  many  profound 
secrets  of  nature." 


336  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

because  many  are  not  capable  of  philosophical  reason- 
ing, because,  also,  such  reasoning  is  a  laborious  and 
long  process ;  because,  again,  the  arguments  and 
authority  of  subtle  philosophers  of  great  name,  who 
are  not  Theists,  may  keep  the  ordinary  mind  from  the 
truth  ;  because,  also,  imagination  and  other  weaknesses 
of  the  individual  reason  may  so  affect  us,  as  to  mingle 
what  is  false  with  what  is  true  in  our  reasonings. 

The  passage  shall  be  quoted  in  full  as  an  excellent 
specimen  of  the  Saint's  intellectual  temper : 

If  a  truth  of  this  nature  were  left  to  the  sole  inquiry  of 
reason,  three  disadvantages  would  follow.  One  is  that  the 
knowledge  of  God  would  be  confined  to  few.  The  discovery 
of  truth  is  the  fruit  of  studious  inquiry.  From  this  very 
many  are  hindered.  Some  are  hindered  by  a  constitutional 
unfitness,  their  natures  being  ill-disposed  to  the  acquisition  of 
knowledge.  They  could  never  arrive  by  study  to  the  highest 
grade  of  human  knowledge,  which  consists  in  the  knowledge 
of  God.  Others  are  hindered  by  the  needs  of  business  and 
the  ties  of  the  management  of  property.  There  must  be  in 
human  society  some  men  devoted  to  temporal  affairs.  These 
could  not  possibly  spend  time  enough  in  the  learned  lessons 
of  speculative  inquiry  to  arrive  at  the  highest  point  of  human 
inquiry,  the  knowledge  of  God.  Some  again  are  hindered 
by  sloth.  The  knowledge  of  the  truths  that  reason  can 
investigate  concerning  God  presupposes  much  previous  know- 
ledge. Indeed  almost  the  entire  study  of  philosophy,  is 
directed  to  the  knowledge  of  God.  Hence,  of  all  parts  of 
philosophy,  that  part  stands  over  to  be  learnt  last,  which 
consists  of  metaphysics  dealing  with  [divine  things].1  Thus, 
only  with  great  labour  of  study  is  it  possible  to  arrive  at  the 
searching  out  of  the  aforesaid  truth  ;  and  this  labour  few  are 
willing  to  undergo  for  sheer  love  of  knowledge. 

1  Father  Rickaby  renders  "  divina  "  by  "  points  of  divinity."  He 
explains  in  a  note,  with  which  I  concur,  that  "  natural  theology "  is 
meant  ;  but  the  phrase  "  points  of  divinity  "  seems  to  me  to  convey  some- 
thing quite  different,  namely,  the  superstructure  of  theology. 


ST.  THOMAS  AQUINAS  AND  MEDIEVAL  THOUGHT    337 

Another  disadvantage  is  that  such  as  did  arrive  at  the 
knowledge  or  discovery  of  the  aforesaid  truth  would  take  a 
long  time  over  it  on  account  of  the  profundity  of  such  truth, 
and  the  many  prerequisites  to  the  study,  and  also  because  in 
youth  and  early  manhood  the  soul,  tossed  to  and  fro  on  the 
waves  of  passion,  is  not  fit  for  the  study  of  such  high  truths  ; 
only  in  settled  age  does  the  soul  become  prudent  and 
scientific,  as  the  philosopher  says.  Thus,  if  the  only  way 
open  to  the  knowledge  of  God  were  the  way  of  reason,  the 
human  race  would  [remain]  in  thick  darkness  of  ignorance : 
as  the  knowledge  of  God,  the  best  instrument  for  making 
men  perfect  and  good,  would  accrue  only  to  a  few  after  a 
long  time.1 

A  third  disadvantage  is  that,  owing  to  the  infirmity  of  our 
judgment  and  the  perturbing  force  of  imagination,  there  is 
some  admixture  of  error  in  most  of  the  investigations  of 
human  reason.  This  would  be  a  reason  to  many  for  con- 
tinuing to  doubt  even  of  the  most  accurate  demonstrations, 
not  perceiving  the  force  of  the  demonstration,  and  seeing  the 
divers  judgments  of  divers  persons  who  have  the  name  of 
being  wise  men.  Besides,  in  the  midst  of  much  demonstrated 
truth  there  is  sometimes  an  element  of  error,  not  demon- 
strated but  asserted  on  the  strength  of  some  plausible  and 
sophistic  reasoning  that  is  taken  for  a  demonstration.  And 
therefore  it  was  necessary  for  the  real  truth  concerning  divine 
things  to  be  presented  to  men  with  fixed  certainty  by  way  of 
faith.  Wholesome,  therefore,  is  the  arrangement  of  divine 
clemency,  whereby  things  even  that  reason  can  investigate 
are  commanded  to  be  held  on  faith,  so  that  all  might  be 
easily  partakers  of  the  knowledge  of  God,  and  that  without 
doubt  and  error  (Book  I.  c.  iv.). 

1  Father  Rickaby  weakens  the  passage,  translating  "  remaneret "  by 
"  dwell  long."  I  have  restored  the  Latin  phrase,  not  in  any  captious 
spirit,  but  because  it  is  to  me  significant  of  the  absolute  candour  of  the 
Saint.  I  do  not  here  enter  on  the  question  of  man's  natural  knowledge  of 
God,  beyond  reminding  the  reader  that  it  is  a  distinct  question  from  that 
of  knowing  God  by  philosophical  reasoning.  This  subject  was  dealt 
with  some  thirty  years  ago  in  the  pages  of  the  Dublin  Review  by  Dr. 
\V.  G.  Ward. 


338  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

This  chapter  does  not  stand  alone  in  its  critical 
and  moderate  estimate  of  the  effectiveness  and 
stability  of  the  unaided  human  reason,  and  the 
recognition  on  the  part  of  the  writer  of  the  force  of 
disturbing  influences  which  in  practice  vitiate  its  con- 
clusions. In  estimating  and  rejecting  the  famous  onto- 
logical  argument  for  Theism,  the  Doctor  Angelicus 
recognizes  clearly  the  force  of  habit  which  leads  men 
to  believe  as  proved  by  reason  what  is  really  only 
rooted  firmly  by  early  associations.  M  Custom,"  St. 
Thomas  writes,  "  takes  the  place  of  nature ;  hence 
notions  wherewith  the  mind  is  imbued  from  childhood 
are  held  as  firmly  as  if  they  were  naturally  known  and 
self-evident."  Again,  Aquinas  distinguishes  between 
arguments  which  may  well  be  used  "  for  the  con- 
solation of  the  faithful,"  and  which  presuppose  faith 
in  those  to  whom  they  are  addressed,  and  those  which 
are  really  cogent  by  themselves ;  and  urges  that  the 
former  should  never  be  used  "for  the  convincing  of 
opponents,  because  the  mere  insufficiency  of  such 
reasoning  would  rather  confirm  them  in  their  error, 
they  thinking  that  we  assent  to  the  truth  of  faith  for 
reasons  so  weak." 

Yet  we  find  in  the  body  of  the  work  categorical 
conclusions  on  the  details  of  the  world  behind  the 
veil  which  startle  our  own  habits  of  thought,  and 
appear  to  come  strangely  from  so  cautious  a  thinker. 
The  cause  lies  no  doubt  partly  in  what  has  already 
been  said — that  the  fashion  of  the  day  demanded  some 
categorical  reply  to  every  question  which  was  raised  : 
the  categorical  form  did  not  necessarily  imply,  as  it 
now  would,  that  the  position  advocated  was  regarded 
as  demonstrably  true.  And  questions  which  the 
twentieth  century  would  never  even  raise  were  asked 


ST.  THOMAS  AQUINAS  AND  MEDIEVAL  THOUGHT    339 

at  that  time  because  those  were  indeed  the  ages  of 
faith,  when  God  and  the  world  behind  the  veil  lived 
in  the  imagination  of  Christendom  as  undoubted 
realities,  in  spite  of  the  scepticism  of  coteries.  To 
inquire  even  minutely  into  a  world  which  was  so 
intensely  real  to  the  writer  was  an  irresistible  impulse, 
and  was  seconded  by  the  conviction,  already  alluded 
to,  that  arguments  in  scientific  form  must  lead  to  real 
knowledge. 

To  go  further  into  this  side  of  the  work  of  which 
I  am  speaking,  and  to  give  the  necessary  qualifica- 
tions to  what  has  been  said  above  generally,  would 
need  a  separate  essay.  Many  of  the  questions 
raised  are  the  outcome  of  an  inquiring  imagination 
based  on  vivid  faith  in  the  unseen.  Others  are 
those  which  the  Arabian  philosophers  had  dis- 
cussed, or  which  had  been  raised  by  Aristotle  him- 
self— specimens  of  the  philosophical  fashion  of  the 
hour,  a  fashion  which  has  passed  away,  in  many 
cases,  as  the  intellectual  fashions  of  our  own  day  may 
pass  too  in  their  turn  ;  and  the  most  critical  reader 
will,  as  we  have  said,  rarely  if  ever  be  dissatisfied 
with  the  answers,  assuming  the  canons  of  reasoning 
of  the  day  to  be  valid,  and  the  problems  to  be  such 
as  can  be  solved  at  all  by  argument. 

But  I  should  wish  in  conclusion  to  consider  two 
questions.  The  first  concerns  the  general  character 
of  St.  Thomas'  work  viewed  as  a  defence  of  Christian 
faith.  I  would  ask,  what  is  the  relation  of  the 
task  which  now  lies  before  the  student  of  the 
Philosophy  of  Christianity  to  the  scheme  which  St. 
Thomas  elaborated ;  secondly,  we  may  ask,  what 
is  the  practical  lesson  we  may  learn  from  his  as  to 
the   best   method   and   temper   for   dealing  with  the 


340  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

problems   raised   by   the   intellectual   fashion   of    the 
present  hour  ? 

As  to  the  first  point,  we  have  seen  that  he  found 
the  University  of  Paris  a  chaos  of  rationalistic  thought. 
The  tendency  manifest  a  century  earlier  in  Abelard, 
who  subjected  such  dogmas  as  the  Trinity  to  rational 
examination,    had    assumed    gigantic    proportions   in 
the  course  of  succeeding  years,  and  had   resulted  in 
a  rationalistic   treatment   of  the    Incarnation,  of  the 
dogmas  of  Creation  and  of  Immortality,    and  of  the 
whole  Christian  theology,  which  ultimately  threatened 
to   destroy   all    faith    in    those    who   adopted  it.     St. 
Thomas'  sharp  distinction  between  truths  known  by 
faith    and    by   reason   stemmed   the    tide.      Reason 
unaided  might  in  the  hands  of  an  Amalric  of  Bena 
be  made  to  prove  that  there  were  many  incarnations, 
or,  in   the  teaching  of  St.   Thomas'  contemporaries, 
that  the  resurrection  of  the  body  was  incredible  ;  but 
such   beliefs   are   established    in    the    pages    of    St. 
Thomas  himself  by  Scripture,  the   Fathers  and  the 
tradition  and  definitions  of  the  Church,  and  should, 
he  maintains,  be  shut  off  from  the  sphere  in  which 
discussion  on  mere  grounds  of  reason  is  admissible. 
Thus  the  rationalistic  disputations  on  revealed  dogmas 
were  banished.    And,  as  we  have  seen,  by  degrees  the 
new  rule  prevailed  in  the  lectures  of  the   University 
professors.     Dr.    Ueberweg  gives  as  the  outcome  of 
the  labours  of  Albertus  and  Thomas   "the  complete 
accomplishment  of  the,  until  then  imperfect,  separation 
of  natural  from  revealed  theology,"  revealed  doctrine 
'*  being  now  maintained  on  the  ground  of  revelation 
alone,  and  withdrawn,  as  a  theological  mystery,  from 
the  sphere  of  philosophical  speculation."1 

1  History  of  Philosophy,  Ueberweg  (English  translation),  i.,  p.  429. 


ST.  THOMAS  AQUINAS  AND  MEDIEVAL  THOUGHT    341 

But  there  was  undoubtedly  a  rationalistic  element 
in  the  very  method  which  had  prevailed  and  which 
St.  Thomas  in  some  measure  had  to  adopt  and  correct. 
The  alternative  system,  which  so  long  contested  the 
ground  with  it,  is  admirably  described  by  Archbishop 
Vaughan  in  his  chapter  on  the  school  of  St.  Victor. 
This  school  held  to  the  monastic  method  which  was 
ultimately  displaced  by  the  scholastic.  The  reverent 
attitude  belonging  to  the  old  monastic  method,  its 
distrust  of  all  dialectic  as  applied  to  things  divine,  its 
sense  of  human  ignorance,  its  trust,  on  the  other  hand, 
in  the  higher  illuminated  perceptions  of  the  holy — this 
was  gone  from  the  new  mode  of  reasoning  though, 
as  Archbishop  Vaughan  truly  says,  it  existed  in  the 
saintly  mind  of  St.  Thomas  himself.  His  mind  was 
largely  monastic  and  Platonic,  though  his  explicit 
method  was  of  necessity  scholastic  and  Aristotelian. 
The  crede  ut  intelligas  of  St.  Anselm,  the  precursor  of 
Scholasticism,  still  preserved  this  earlier  attitude — 
this  way  of  using  the  human  reason  in  things  divine. 
It  was  something  apart  from  the  new  distinction 
between  the  premises  applicable  to  truths  of  reason 
and  truths  of  revelation.  It  included  that  sense  of 
the  inadequacy  of  our  reason  to  penetrate  into 
mysteries  beyond  the  world  of  sense,  which  is  re- 
presented and  exaggerated  in  modern  Agnosticism. 
And  it  included  the  recognition  of  a  perception  on  the 
part  of  the  individual,  whose  spirit  M  tastes  "  the  things 
of  God.  This  view  is  akin  to  that  now  represented 
in  modern  theories  of  "  religious  experience,"  which 
recognize  that  the  grounds  of  religious  belief  must  be 
largely  personal — though  too  often  such  theories 
substitute  mere  instinct  for  illuminated  reason.  It  was 
indeed  the  rationalistic  effect  of  the  loss  of  this  earlier 


342  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

and  higher  philosophy  of  the  Fathers  which  made  so 
necessary  the  marked  separation  between  the  two 
kinds  of  truth.  A  reason,  stretching  out  reverent 
hands  towards  things  divine,  might  be  allowed  to 
touch  the  most  sacred  truths.  But  the  meddling 
rationalistic  reason  of  the  thirteenth-century  pantheists 
could  not.  It  must  be  simply  "hands  off"  for  the 
rationalists  so  far  as  the  hallowed  ground  of  revelation 
was  concerned. 

The  term  "  faith  "  is  still  used  in  our  theological 
text-books  only  in  St.  Thomas'  sense  of  belief  on 
the  authority  of  God  revealing.  But  it  stands  in 
popular  writings  for  something  over  and  above  reason, 
namely,  that  process  or  attitude  of  the  spirit  and  mind 
of  man,  which  leads  him  to  believe  in  God  Himself 
as  well  as  in  revelation.  It  recognizes  at  once  the 
certainty  of  revelation  and  the  inadequacy  of  the 
human  mind  fully  to  analyze  its  grounds  or  its  con- 
tents. This  attitude  is  recognized  pre-eminently  by 
St.  Bernard,  and  even,  as  we  have  said,  by  the  earliest 
of  the  scholastics,  St.  Anselm.  The  age  of  sharp 
distinctions,  and  of  a  dialectic  which  regarded  only 
ground  common  to  all  minds  alike,  banished  so 
personal  an  element  from  the  terrain  recognized  by 
philosophy,  though  unable  to  banish  it  from  life. 

It  has  not  perhaps  even  now  returned  to  our 
theory  of  knowledge  as  fully  as  right  reason  demands. 
But  Coleridge  and  Newman  saw  its  importance,  and 
it  formed  the  staple  of  their  philosophy  of  "faith." 
Just  as  Hegel  analyzed  "self-realization  by  self- 
denial,"  which  had  from  the  beginning  been  the 
secret  of  Christianity,  so  the  task  now  lies  before 
us  of  analyzing  those  attitudes  of  mind  and  instru- 
ments of  knowledge,  the  different  estimates  of  which 


ST.  THOMAS  AQUINAS  AND  MEDIEVAL  THOUGHT    343 

issue,  on  the  one  hand  in  Theism  and  Christianity, 
and  on  the  other  in  Agnosticism. 

The  method  of  Aristotle  could  not  effectually 
penetrate  beyond  the  world  of  sense,  and  the  greatest 
brilliancy  in  the  dialectical  tournament  could  not 
enable  the  combatants  to  soar  above  the  wrestling 
ground  on  which  it  was  conducted.  The  wings 
needed  to  soar  can  only  be  given  by  that  philosophy 
which  underlies  the  Gospels  themselves,  a  philosophy 
which  finds  partial  expression  in  Plato,  which  lies  at 
the  root  of  St.  Bernard's  assaults  on  Abelard,  which 
is  lightly  traced  in  St.  Anselm's  Cur  Deus  Homo  t 
An  appraisement  of  the  personal  apprehension  of  the 
Divine  by  the  human  conscience,  and  especially  by 
the  illuminated  intelligence  of  the  Saints,  is  essential 
to  an  adequate  philosophy  of  religious  belief.  St. 
Thomas  separated  the  sphere  of  faith  from  that  of 
reason,  and  preserved  the  former  from  rationalistic 
treatment  by  a  distinction  which  also  shut  off  some 
of  the  earlier  defences  of  revealed  doctrine.  But  the 
process  whereby  the  mind  passes  from  the  one  sphere 
to  the  other  needed  for  its  full  investigation  the  philo- 
sophy of  the  Fathers.  Archbishop  Vaughan  rightly 
insists  on  the  fact  that  that  Philosophy  was  Platonic, 
while  St.  Thomas'  method  was  Aristotelic.  The 
spirit  of  the  former  the  Angelic  Doctor  preserved 
in  his  own  highest  mental  instincts.  But  its  principles 
are  not  those  of  his  explicit  system.  "His  '  angelic  ' 
bias,"  writes  Archbishop  Vaughan,  "was  Platonic,  his 
school  gifts  Aristotelic."  ■ 

But  in  the  second  and  still  more  practical  matter  : 
How  shall  the  Christian  theologian  deal  with  the 
secular  learning  of  his  time  ?  we  have  everything  to 

1  Life  of  St.  Thomas  of  Again,  ii.,  pp.  671,  672. 


344  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

learn  from  St.  Thomas.  Father  Rickaby  in  a  valuable 
essay  has  commended  the  Szcmrna  contra  Gentiles  as 
conveying,  especially  to  contemporary  theologians,  a 
sense  of  the  duty  and  necessity  of  keeping  abreast  of 
the  thought  and  learning  of  their  age.  And  this  warn- 
ing becomes  the  more  impressive  if  what  has  been 
said  above  is  true,  namely,  that  the  new  learning  and 
the  movement  of  thought  of  the  thirteenth  century 
did  involve  elements  which  not  all  the  genius  of  St. 
Thomas  could  make  other  than  they  were — elements 
of  an  essentially  rationalistic  method.  Human  reason, 
even  aided  by  the  authoritative  premises  which  the 
later  scholastics  invoked,  was  unequal  to  the  positive 
determination  of  many  of  the  problems  it  attempted 
to  solve.  The  distinction  so  strongly  insisted  on, 
between  the  two  classes  of  truths,  averted  rationalistic 
conclusions,  and  preserved  the  sacred  territory  of 
revelation  from  rationalistic  assault ;  but  it  could  not 
save  a  system  at  once  sceptical  and  credulous,  of 
universal  inquisitiveness  and  of  trust  in  the  all-solving 
power  of  the  syllogism,  from  being  both  unreasonable 
and  rationalistic,  if  viewed  apart  from  the  strong 
antidotes  supplied  by  the  Saint.  Nevertheless,  this 
system  had  so  completely  got  possession  of  the  edu- 
cated world  that  St.  Thomas,  with  a  singular  and  wise 
boldness,  undertook  the  task  of  reconciling  it  with 
Christian  theology. 

And  let  us  mark  the  result.  He  did  not  satisfy 
his  contemporaries  by  any  means  universally.  Certain 
propositions  from  his  works  were  condemned  by  the 
bishop  who  presided  over  the  very  scene  of  his  lectures, 
— by  Bishop  Tempier  of  Paris, — three  years  after  his 
death.  His  lectures  had  not  the  magical  effect  of  at 
once  dispelling  in  the  University  an  unruly  movement 


ST.  THOMAS  AQUINAS  AND  MEDIEVAL  THOUGHT    345 

of  thought.  Archbishop  Vaughan  recognizes  the  fact 
that  the  movement  outlived  the  Saint.  Yet  the  writings 
which  he  left  behind  him  gave  just  what  was  needed 
for  the  rising  generation,  as  his  lectures  had  given  it 
for  his  own  immediate  pupils.  Those  who  were  dis- 
posed to  believe  in  the  Christian  theology,  and  yet 
were  troubled  by  the  antagonism  between  what  they 
regarded  as  the  genius  and  learning  of  the  day,  and 
the  old  theological  writings  which  took  no  account  of 
them,  found  rest  in  this  reconciliation  of  the  truths  of 
philosophy  and  faith  by  one  who  united  the  reverent 
temper  of  a  Saint  with  a  mind  of  consummate  ability. 
And  when  the  generation  incurably  habituated  to 
rationalistic  discussion  had  passed  away,  the  orderly 
structure  of  theological  science  provided  by  Aquinas 
prevailed  so  completely,  that  within  fifty  years  of  his 
death  il  buon  fra  Tommaso  towers  with  almost  the 
authority  of  an  inspired  writer  over  the  epoch  of  Dante, 
as  we  plainly  see  in  the  Divina  Commedia  itself. 

This  is  the  lesson  which  appears  to  me  to  be  at 
the  present  hour  the  more  universally  valuable,  just 
because  it  speaks  to  those  who  are  most  alive  to  the 
perverse  elements  of  the  characteristic  thought  of  our 
own  time  and  to  its  excesses.  Let  it  be  granted  that 
some  of  the  extremely  speculative  conclusions  put 
forth  by  exponents  of  the  higher  criticism  are  as 
extravagant  as  the  medieval  belief  that  the  syllogism 
could  discover  the  secrets  of  nature,  that  they  are 
sometimes  as  unreliable  from  their  extreme  fanciful- 
ness  as  the  replies  to  the  most  insoluble  problems 
made  by  those  medieval  schoolmen  whose  excessive 
subtlety  Leo  XIII.  gently  reproved.  Yet  to  proscribe 
the  really  scientific  use  of  that  critical  method  which 
has  hold  of  all  minds  which  think  on  such  subjects, 


346  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

would  be  as  ineffectual  now  as  the  bonfires  fed  by 
living  rationalists  were  in  the  Paris  of  1209.  On  the 
other  hand,  a  strenuous  effort  to  deal  with  modern 
criticism,  to  keep  it  within  its  reasonable  limits,  to 
restrain  by  its  own  principles  a  method  which  professes 
to  be  cautious  and  experimental,  but  which  is  con- 
stantly proving  itself  in  the  highest  degree  theoretical, 
speculative  and  adventurous,  is  just  the  medicine 
which  will  remedy  the  ills  of  the  hour  after  the  manner 
of  Albertus  and  Thomas.  If  work  in  the  field  marked 
out  by  the  "  higher  criticism  "  is  occasionally  touched 
by  some  of  the  defects  of  the  method  it  has  to  use, 
that  does  not  make  it  the  less  necessary.  If  those 
few  who  are  competent  to  undertake  it  are  afforded  no 
scope  for  their  energies,  humanly  speaking,  the  move- 
ment of  criticism  must  lead  widely  to  the  destruction 
of  faith,  especially  in  those  masses  of  half-educated 
people  for  whose  especial  benefit  the  avoidance  of 
unsettling  discussions  is  professedly  designed.  It  is 
quite  true  that,  in  the  earliest  stages  of  such  a  move- 
ment, the  simple  are  those  whose  faith  is  most  easily 
overset  on  a  first  acquaintance  with  the  new  problems  ; 
but  questions  which  are  now  mooted  in  the  Daily 
Mail  and  Daily  Telegraph  cannot  be  regarded  as 
permanently  the  secrets  of  the  learned  few.  And 
when  such  questions  are  widely  raised,  it  is  precisely 
the  simpler  souls,  those  least  qualified  to  meet  them 
rationally,  who  most  need  a  recognized  literature  the 
work  of  men  at  once  expert  as  critics  and  orthodox  as 
theologians.  Such  a  literature  is  the  indispensable 
guide  and  authority  for  the  average  mind.  Its  very 
existence,  and  its  recognition  on  the  part  of  the  official 
rulers,  are  a  support  to  him.  If  it  exists,  his  faith  is 
saved.     If  it  does  not,  humanly  speaking,  it  goes. 


XII 

CARDINAL   NEWMAN   ON   CON- 
STRUCTIVE  RELIGIOUS  THOUGHT 

Cardinal  Newman,  in  speaking  of  the  scholastic 
theology  which  emerged  from  the  new  apologetic  of 
St.  Thomas,  and  from  his  attempt  to  reconcile  the 
thought  of  his  day  with  the  essence  of  Christian 
tradition,  points  out  that  it  "  involved  a  creative  act  of 
the  intellect."  In  the  earlier  period,  popularly  known 
as  the  Dark  Ages,  theology  had  been,  he  reminds  us, 
mainly  in  the  hands  of  devout  Benedictine  monks, 
whose  "  intellect  attempted  no  comprehension  of  this 
multiform  world."  It  had  consisted  in  "a  loving 
study  and  exposition  of  Holy  Scripture  according  to 
the  teaching  of  the  Fathers,  who  had  studied  and 
expounded  it  before  them.  It  was  a  loyal  adherence 
to  the  teaching  of  the  past,  a  faithful  inculcation  of  it, 
an  anxious  transmission  of  it  to  the  next  generation." 
Theology  was  receptive,  not  creative.  The  period  in 
question  was  not  marked  by  that  intellectual  activity 
which  makes  on  the  one  hand  brilliant  heresiarchs, 
on  the  other  great  constructive  theologians. 

But  if  we  go  back  earlier  again  to  the  patristic 
period,  we  have  once  more  a  creative  movement  of 
thought.  "  Origen,  Tertullian,  Athanasius,  Chry- 
sostom,    Augustine,    Jerome,    Leo,"   writes    Cardinal 


348  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

Newman  in  his  Historical  Sketches^  "are  authors  of 
powerful  original  minds,  and  engaged  in  the  produc- 
tion of  original  works."  Yet  earlier  we  have  another 
period  of  simple  receptivity.  The  earlier  sub- 
apostolic  days  had  been  in  this  respect  like  the  later 
epoch  of  the  monks.  Theology  had  meant  the 
anxious  and  reverent  transmission  of  what  had  been 
received, — of  the  teaching  of  the  Apostles.  In  the 
modern  sense,  indeed,  theology  did  not  exist.  It  did 
not  profess  to  be  a  science.  The  Christian  brother- 
hood belonged  mainly  to  the  uncultured  classes  and 
was  one  in  mind.  The  first  Pontiff  had  been  a  fisher- 
man, and  vivid  faith  rather  than  learning  or  intellectual 
subtlety  characterized  the  community.  Each  man  re- 
ceived in  unquestioning  simplicity  what  he  was  taught. 
Creative  and  constructive  Christian  thought  was  first 
demanded  when  this  simple,  unquestioning,  unanalytical 
attitude  of  mind  became  impossible,  because  the 
character  of  the  community  changed.  When  thinkers 
and  philosophers  became  Christians,  and  attempted, 
each  in  his  own  way,  the  intellectual  explication  of  the 
faith,  sects  and  heresies  arose  of  necessity,  and  called 
in  response  for  the  work  of  the  creative  theologians. 
These  men  dealt  with  the  philosophical  theories 
broached  by  various  thinkers,  and  rejected  or  assimi- 
lated them  as  the  essential  character  of  the  Christian 
revelation  demanded. 

Origen,  in  writing  against  Celsus,  notes  this 
advance  from  the  unity  existing  among  the  simple 
Christians  of  early  days,  to  the  divisions  which 
speculation  necessarily  brought.  "  When,"  he  says, 
"  men,  not  slaves  and  mechanics  only,  but  also  many 
of  the   educated    classes    in    Greece,   saw  something 

1  H.  p.  475- 


NEWMAN  ON  CONSTRUCTIVE  RELIGIOUS  THOUGHT  349 

venerable  in  Christianity,  sects  necessarily  arose,  not 
simply  from  love  of  strife  and  contradiction,  but 
because  many  learned  men  strove  to  penetrate  more 
deeply  into  the  truths  of  Christianity." '  It  was  this 
effort,  then,  which  led  to  the  development  on  the  one 
hand  of  heresy,  on  the  other  of  constructive  Christian 
thought. 

The  original  conservative  spirit  of  Christianity 
was  not,  however,  abrogated.  It  remained  as  a  check 
upon  random  speculation.  It  traced  deeply  the  lines 
of  the  original  revelation  which  was  a  guide  to  the 
theologians  in  their  work.  This  conservative  element 
was  especially  represented  by  the  official  rulers  of  the 
Church,  the  spiritual  descendants  of  the  Apostles. 
To  guard  the  original  revelation,  the  depositum  fidei 
which  had  been  committed  to  them,  was  their  primary 
duty.  If  Rome  be  regarded  as  the  normal  represen- 
tative of  tradition  and  stable  rule,  and  of  the  conserva- 
tism which  this  implies,  this  function  may  be  styled  the 
"  Roman  "  element  in  the  polity  of  the  Church.  On 
the  other  hand,  new  aspects  of  thought  not  expressly 
contemplated  in  the  simple  divine  message,  yet  bear- 
ing upon  its  application  and  interpretation,  could  not 
but  present  themselves  to  active  minds  which  were 
stimulated  to  inquiry  by  the  philosophies  of  the  day. 
And  this  force,  pressing  onwards  towards  change  and 
necessitating  further  explication  of  the  revelation  in 
definite  thought  forms,  may  perhaps  be  spoken  of  as 
the  "  Greek  "  element  in  the  Church.  While  then  the 
Roman  element — that  is  to  say,  the  force  embodying 
tradition,  rule,  uniformity — was  represented  primarily 
by  the  authorities,  the  Greek  element — that  is,  the 
force  embodying  vital  thought — was  asserted  by  the 

1  See  Origen,  Contra  Celsum,  III.  12. 


350  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

adventurous  thinkers  who  became  heresiarchs,  and  by 
the  creative  theologians.  It  is  hardly  an  exaggera- 
tion to  say  that  the  whole  history  of  theology  is  the 
record  of  the  interaction  between  these  two  forces. 
The  difference  between  the  two  representatives  of  the 
Greek  element  was  that  the  heretics  recognized 
insufficiently  or  not  at  all  that  higher  knowledge 
which  should  check  or  modify  their  own  speculations, 
while  the  orthodox  theologians  realized  as  thought 
what  the  authorities  guarded  as  law,  namely,  the 
essential  genius  of  the  Christian  tradition  and  revela- 
tion. This  realization  might  almost  be  compared  to 
a  chemical  test,  whereby  they  determined  how  far 
contemporary  speculations  were  or  were  not  admissible 
without  endangering  the  faith  that  was  committed  to 
the  Church  for  ever. 

Careful  historians  representing  standpoints  as 
different  as  those  of  Cardinal  Newman  and  Harnack 
have  pointed  out  that  the  very  first  thorough-going 
exercise  of  the  intellect  on  the  Christian  faith  brought 
into  relief  the  phenomena  of  which  I  speak.  The 
Gnostics,  as  both  writers  agree,1  were  the  first  to 
exercise  the  intellect  systematically  on  Christianity. 
In  doing  so  they  lost  sight  of  the  Apostolic  tradition 
and  rejected  the  Old  Testament.  St.  Irenaeus  opposed 
to  their  bold  speculations  the  original  Christian  rule 
of  faith,  and  rejected  their  theories  as  on  the  whole 
unorthodox.  Yet  the  influence  of  Gnosticism  on 
subsequent  Christian  thought  is  recognized  on  all 
hands  to  have  been  very  great,  and  Newman  traces 

1  "  The  Gnostics,"  writes  Newman,  "  seem  first  to  have  systematically 
thrown  the  intellect  upon  matters  of  faith  "  {Essay  on  Development,  p. 
365).  Harnack  describes  them  as  "the  first  to  transform  Christianity 
into  a  system  of  doctrines "  {History  of  Dogma,  English  translation, 
Williams  and  Norgate,  I.  p.  227). 


NEWMAN  ON  CONSTRUCTIVE  RELIGIOUS  THOUGHT  351 

to  the  Gnostics  ideas  which  were  eventually  accepted  in 
a  modified  form  by  orthodox  theologians,  when  once 
Christian  thought  had  asserted  its  supremacy  and  vindi- 
cated the  sacredness  of  tradition.  "Gnosticism  has 
left  an  enduring  mark  in  the  history  of  the  Church," 
says  a  writer  in  the  Catholic  Dictionary.  "The  Arian 
heresy  itself  did  not  contribute  more  to  the  develop- 
ment of  Catholic  doctrine."  "  The  scientific  labours 
in  the  Church,"  writes  Harnack,  "  were  a  continuation 
of  the  Gnostic  schools  under  altered  circumstances, 
i.e.  under  the  sway  of  a  tradition  which  was  now 
more  clearly  defined  and  more  firmly  fenced  round  as 
a  noli  me  tangere." x  The  Gnostic  speculations  were 
among  those  which  supplied,  as  Newman  points  out, 
"the  raw  material"  which  the  Church  "had  the 
power  by  means  of  the  certainty  and  firmness  of  her 
principles  to  convert  to  her  own  uses."  2 

The  contest  between  the  Roman  and  Greek 
elements  was  more  simple  at  the  outset  than  it  became 
later  on.  Conservatism,  when  that  which  was  to  be 
preserved  was  the  divine  revelation  as  the  Apostles 
had  handed  it  down,  was  hardly  on  the  same  plane 
with  the  speculative  theories,  which  it  nevertheless 
rightly  checked  and  controlled.  But  when  the  first 
great  creative  period  was  over,  when  the  theology 
of  the  Fathers  with  its  large  Greek  element  was 
accepted  as  authoritative,  all  the  intensely  conservative 
genius  of  Catholicism  resumed  its  sway  with  a  new 
consequence.  It  was  not  simply  the  divine  revelation, 
the  original  depositum  fidei  committed  to  inspired 
Apostles,  which  was  preserved  by  the  faithful  and  by 

1  See  Harnack's  whole  analysis  of  this  interesting  view  of  the  case, 
History  of  Dogma,  I .  pp.  226  seq. 

2  See  Essay  on  the  Development  of  Christian  Doctrine,  p.  364. 


352  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

the  monastic  theologians  as  sacred,  but  its  exposition 
by  men — saintly  and  learned  men,  and  of  great  genius 
it  is  true — but  still  by  men  who  were  not  individually  in- 
fallible, and  whose  thought  was  largely  conditioned  by 
the  intellectual  characteristics  of  their  own  epoch  and 
determined  by  its  controversies.     The  very  definitions 
of  the  Church  were  led  up  to  and  called  for  by  those 
controversies.     And  though  vigilant  theologians  have 
ever  remembered  this  fact,  and  pointed  out  that  not 
the   antecedent   reasonings    but  only    the   definitions 
themselves  were  divinely  guaranteed,  the  mental  effort 
necessary  for  the  thorough  and  accurate  separation  of 
the  divine  from  the  human  element  in  the  theological 
process  of  which  they  were  the  outcome,  could  not 
always  be  successfully  made.     The  existing  theology 
was  preserved  as  sacred  with  its  human  and  divine 
elements   together.     This   fact  helped   to  make   the 
scholastic  revolution  of  the  thirteenth  century  widely 
regarded   at   first  as   unorthodox   in   tendency,  even 
apart  from  the  actual  heresies  to  which  it  gave  cur- 
rency.    For  any  great  theological  innovation  appeared 
to  touch  with  rude  hands  the  sacred  structure  which  it 
seemed  profanation  to  examine  with  critical  scrutiny. 
But  still  more  was  the  situation  complicated  when 
the  highly  speculative   movement  of  the   thirteenth 
century,  having  run  its  course  as  heresy  and  become 
modified  and  regulated  by  Albertus  Magnus  and  St. 
Thomas   into   at   first   tolerated  and  then    approved 
orthodoxy,  entered  upon  its  last  stage.    The  approved 
writings  of  the  Scholastics  came  to  be  regarded  as 
venerable   oracles,  and  were  received    by  the   many 
almost  without  question.     A  body  of  thought  stamped 
by  the  most  marked  peculiarities  of  the  age  in  which 
it  was  elaborated,  was  almost  inevitably  invested  with 


NEWMAN  ON  CONSTRUCTIVE  RELIGIOUS  THOUGHT   353 

the  sacredness  belonging  to  the  time-honoured  theology 
which  is  the  approved  guardian  of  the  deposit.  Its 
jealous  preservation  was  now  the  natural  means  of 
fulfilling  the  precept,  deposihim  ctistodi. 

For  the  restful  life  of  devotion  this  was  simply 
gain,  for  it  meant  the  return  to  the  normal  and 
desirable  Christian  attitude  of  unquestioning  and  un- 
critical belief.  But  rest  for  the  faithful  did  not  mean 
intellectual  finality,  and  in  the  field  of  controversy 
this  state  of  things  brought  obvious  disadvantages. 
The  separation  of  the  divine  and  human  elements 
became  very  difficult  in  a  theological  structure  so  com- 
plicated ;  indeed  perhaps  nothing  short  of  an  urgent 
intellectual  necessity  could  make  it  even  approximately 
possible.  Thus  a  mass  of  minute  reasoning  came  down 
to  later  times,  accepted  very  largely  on  authority,  and 
less  capable  in  each  succeeding  generation  of  con- 
vincing the  intellect  of  ages  whose  culture  and  axioms 
of  reasoning  became  ever  further  removed  from  the 
medieval.  Its  developments  became  in  some  cases 
fantastic.  Readers  of  the  Life  of  Sir  Thomas  More 
know  how  even  in  the  sixteenth  century  the  dis- 
advantages of  this  state  of  things  were  already  felt. 
The  scholastic  writings  then  popular  were  in  More's 
eyes  like  an  acrobatic  display,  a  system  of  guess-work, 
clever  but  unnatural,  and  by  no  means  effectual  in 
building  up  a  strong  and  healthy  Christian  intelligence, 
which  should  (he  maintained)  rather  seek  its  nourish- 
ment in  Scripture  and  the  Fathers.  He  thus  addresses 
the  typical  representative  of  the  system : 

Let  us  suppose  that  Scripture  is  easy  and  your  questions 
difficult,  yet  the  knowledge  of  the  former  may  be  far  more 
fruitful  than  the  guessing  at  the  latter.  To  dance,  or  bend 
double  like  an  acrobat,  is  more  difficult  than  to  walk,  and  it 

2    A 


354  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

is  easier  to  masticate  bread  than  to  grind  potsherds  between 
the  teeth,  but  what  man  would  not  prefer  the  common  pro- 
cesses of  nature  to  such  empty  feats  ?  Which,  then,  of  these 
disciplines  is  the  easier  I  will  not  ask,  but  I  cannot  hear  it  said 
that  these  minute  questionings  are  more  useful  than  the 
knowledge  of  the  sacred  writings  to  the  flock  for  which  Christ 
died.1 

More  maintains  that  anything  added  by  the 
schoolmen  to  the  teaching  of  the  Fathers  and  the 
Scriptures  is  not  to  be  regarded  as  essential  to  a 
Catholic's  belief.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  the  syste- 
matic form  adopted  by  the  schoolmen  had  obvious 
controversial  advantages,  and  the  scholastic  method 
flourished  after  the  Reformation.  More  himself 
became  less  critical,  and  more  alive  to  the  dangerous 
consequences  of  dissatisfaction  with  the  existing  state 
of  things  within  the  Church.  The  ecclesiastical 
revolution  gave  new  authority  to  all  the  forces  of  law 
and  conservatism — and  among  them  to  the  writings 
of  the  schoolmen. 

I  propose  here  to  speak  of  a  movement  of 
Christian  thought  in  the  nineteenth  century  which 
suddenly  gave  to  the  Catholic  intellect  a  new  direction, 
— which  developed  what  I  have  termed  the  "  Greek  " 
element  in  quite  a  new  field.  Scholasticism,  which 
had  represented  the  Greek  element — that  is,  the  living 
thought  of  the  age — in  the  thirteenth  century,  had 
come,  at  the  end  of  the  seventeenth  century,  to  be 
the  most  serviceable  embodiment  of  the  Roman 
element — the  instrument  for  securing  order  and 
uniformity,  the  organ  of  reverent,  unquestioning,  un- 
critical, conservative  tradition.     The  great  schoolmen, 

1  See  Father  Bridgett's  Life  of  Sir  Thomas  More,  Burns  &  Oates,  pp. 
91,  92. 


NEWMAN  ON  CONSTRUCTIVE  RELIGIOUS  THOUGHT  355 

of  course,  as  St.  Thomas  and  St.  Bonaventure,  had 
given  to  theology  thoughts  which  were  a  legacy  for  all 
time.  Great  truths  were  enshrined  in  the  works  of 
Suarez,  de  Lugo  and  their  contemporaries.  But  the 
cast  of  their  thought  and  expression  did  not  belong  to 
and  often  did  not  appeal  to  the  age.  And  the  still 
later  scholastics,  whom  Lacordaire  compared  to  Swiss 
guides,  who  all  follow  the  same  fixed  routes,1  appeared 
to  their  critics  to  repeat  almost  mechanically  the 
expressions  of  the  earlier,  not  adequately  realizing 
either  the  thought  of  the  thirteenth  century  or  that  of 
their  own  day.  Something  else  was  needed  to  repre- 
sent what  I  have  called  the  Greek  element — to  be  to 
Catholic  thought  what  the  works  of  Clement  and 
Aquinas  had  each  been  in  their  own  time.  That  some- 
thing came,  and  had  to  fix  its  relations  with  the  older 
theology.  The  process  of  adjustment  between  the 
two  has  not  yet  reached  its  term.  Let  us  study  its 
beginnings,  that  we  may  be  the  better  able  to  forecast 
its  future. 

I  have  pointed  out  incidentally  that  what  comes 
ultimately  to  be  spoken  of  as  "theology"  may  be  in 
the  making  partly  "  Apologetic,"  and  partly  an  attempt 
at  the  reconciliation  of  contemporary  thought  with 
Christianity.  The  earliest  Christian  writers,  St. 
Justin  and  his  contemporaries,  undertook  Apologetic 
against  the  heathen.  St.  Irenaeus  defended  traditional 
Christianity  against  the  Gnostics.  The  defence  of 
orthodoxy  against  Pelagians,  Donatists  and  other 
heretics  brought  out  some  of  St.  Augustine's  finest 
work.  Both  the  controversial  and  assimilative  work 
of  the   Fathers   is  familiar  to  readers  of  Newman's 

1  See  Inner  Life  of  Lacordaire,  English  translation,  Burns  &  Oates, 
p.  72. 


356  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

Essay  on  Development.  St.  Thomas  also  first  outlined 
his  theology  in  his  avowedly  apologetic  Summa  contra 
Gentiles.  And  much  of  the  greater  and  later  Summa 
Theologies,  which,  in  his  own  time,  was  undertaken  as 
apologetic  work,  occupying  a  field  considerably  wider 
than  theology  as  it  was  understood  in  still  earlier  days, 
became  the  model  of  the  theology  for  the  future. 
That  is  to  say,  it  became  the  acknowledged  scientific 
exposition  of  the  Christian  revelation  in  its  conse- 
quences and  in  its  relation  to  other  fields  of  know- 
ledge. 

The  "creative"  religious  thought  called  for  by 
more  modern  inquiries  has  occupied  a  wider  field 
than  that  contemplated  in  the  theology  of  St.  Thomas, 
just  as  his  theology  covered  wider  ground  than  the 
Patristic.  The  creative  theology  of  the  Fathers  was 
the  outcome  of  the  work  of  thoughtful  and  learned 
Christians  writing  what  they  felt  to  be  needed  for 
existing  circumstances.  So,  too,  St.  Thomas  from 
his  professor's  chair  at  Paris  had  to  expound  the 
Christian  faith  to  men  imbued  with  the  culture  given 
by  Greek,  Arabian,  and  Jewish  philosophy.  The 
form  of  exposition  was  determined  in  each  case  by 
the  emergency.  Posterity  saw  in  both  a  creative 
contribution  to  theology.  For  the  writers  themselves 
it  was  enough  that  they  tried  to  meet  the  needs  of 
thinking  Christians. 

I  will  here  attempt  an  outline  of  a  modern  in- 
tellectual movement  which  has  at  least  the  qualities 
just  quoted  :  (i)  that  it  has  utilized  the  characteristic 
thought  of  the  day  in  expounding  and  defending 
Christianity ;  (2)  that  it  has  been  in  one  of  its  phases 
apologetic  ;  (3)  that  it  is  in  another  phase  an  attempt 
partially  to  reconcile  Christian  thought  with  modern 


NEWMAN  ON  CONSTRUCTIVE  RELIGIOUS  THOUGHT  357 

methods  and  modern  science, — that  it  has  striven 
to  unify  from  the  Christian  standpoint  the  general 
knowledge  represented  in  the  Universities  of  the 
nineteenth  and  twentieth  centuries,  as  Alexander  of 
Hales  and  St.  Thomas  strove  to  unify  that  of  medieval 
Paris.  This  last  work  is  that  which  is  systemati- 
cally attempted  in  the  Institut  de  St.  Thomas  at 
Louvain.1 

Speaking  broadly,  the  story  of  the  nineteenth 
century  within  the  Catholic  Church  presents  the 
following  sequences.  Pius  VII.  came  to  the  papal 
throne  at  its  dawn,  when  the  Church  was  at  a  very 
low  ebb  of  power,  and  its  dissolution  was  prophesied. 
The  papacy  naturally  welcomed  support  wherever  it 
could  get  it.  Many  eminent  writers,  some  Catholic 
in  faith,  some  only  in  sympathy, — philosophers, 
historians,  writers  of  romance,  as  well  as  theologians, 
arose  at  this  supreme  moment  to  place  before  the 
imagination  of  the  world  the  beauty  and  beneficence 
of  the  Christian  Church,  of  its  saints,  its  thinkers,  its 
institutions.  They  carried  triumphantly  a  movement  of 
reaction  against  the  unjust  and  unphilosophical  depre- 
ciation of  tradition,  in  religion  and  in  social  life,  which 
had  culminated  in  the  philosophy  of  the  Encyclopedists 
and  the  French  Revolution.  While  the  allied  powers 
were  combining  to  restore  the  venerable  dynasties  of 
Europe,  and  the  papacy  itself,  and  to  enlist  against 
revolutionary  unrest  all  the  dignity  and  stability  of 
historic  claims,  a  somewhat  similar  work  was  being 
done  by  a  large  section  of  European  thinkers  in 
regard  to  religion.  The  value  of  the  Church  as  a 
social    factor  was    recognized   by  many  who   did  not 

1  The  reader  may  be  referred  to  the  Dublin  Review  of  July,  1913,  for 
an  account  of  the  Louvain  philosophical  system. 


358  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

regard  it  as  divine.  The  best  intellect  of  the  times 
combined  to  reinstate  the  ancient  Church  as  it  were 
with  foreign  bayonets,  when  its  own  soldiers  had 
suffered  defeat.  Writers  like  A.  W.  Schlegel,  Novalis 
and  Tieck  united  with  such  Catholic  champions  as 
Chateaubriand,  de  Maistre,  Frederick  Schlegel  and 
de  Bonald.  They  restored  the  influence  of  historical 
Christianity  and  of  Catholicism  with  the  aid  of  con- 
siderations suggested  by  the  intellectual  genius  of 
the  hour,  when  the  Catholic  theological  schools,  cast 
in  the  medieval  mould,  had  proved  unequal  to  the 
task  of  influencing  a  world  which  had  rejected 
their  fundamental  axioms  and  many  of  their  canons 
of  reasoning.  A  general  movement  ensued,  of  re- 
search and  thought,  inspired  by  that  aspect  of 
Christianity  which  appeared  most  significant  to  the 
time-spirit. 

The  story  of  the  new  apologetic  at  its  head- 
quarters, in  the  land  of  the  great  revolution,  has  been 
retold  within  the  last  few  years  by  a  writer  who  is 
in  an  especial  sense  an  heir  to  its  labours,  the  late 
M.  Leon  Olle  Laprune,  in  his  book,  La  Vitaliti 
Chretienne.  I  shall  here  avail  myself  of  the  testimony 
of  one  who  was  so  intimately  acquainted  with  its 
details. 

M  The  eighteenth  century,"  says  this  distinguished 
French  writer,  "had  banished  Christianity  from  the 
cultivated  world,  from  the  thinking  world.  It  was 
to  be  the  work  of  the  nineteenth  century  to  bring  it 
back."  This  was  the  aim  of  the  new  Apologetic. 
The  eighteenth  century  had  been  for  Catholic  theology 
a  period  of  inertia.  The  great  struggle  with 
Protestantism  was  practically  over.  The  intellect  of 
the  age  had  passed  on  to  free  thought.     The  Church 


NEWMAN  ON  CONSTRUCTIVE  RELIGIOUS  THOUGHT  359 

was  despised  by  the  thinkers.  She  rested  after  her 
long  battle  almost  unnoticed.1 

And  that  battle  had  had  one  result,  which  lent 
itself  to  crystallization  in  her  theology  and  her  polity. 
It  had  been  a  vigorous  defensive  movement  against 
the  onslaught  of  the  reformers  on  behalf  of  the 
existing  system  and  existing  authority  and  institutions. 
An  immense  effort  of  consolidation  had  been  made. 
The  tendency  among  Catholic  thinkers  of  the  early 
sixteenth  century  to  assimilate  much  of  the  culture 
of  the  Renaissance  epoch  was  abruptly  checked  by 
the  stern  necessity  of  defending  the  medieval  theology. 
Men  like  Erasmus  and  More  in  different  ways  and 
degrees  marked  the  transition.  Sympathetic  in  their 
earlier  days  to  a  wide  culture,  hostile  to  the  dogmatism 
of  a  degenerate  scholasticism,  severe  critics  of  abuses 
among  the  ecclesiastical  authorities,  and  tolerant  of 
new  ideas,  both  of  them  recognized  before  they  died 
that  criticism  must  give  place  to  union  in  the  presence 
of  the  common  foe.  For  Catholics  had  before  them 
a  struggle  pro  arts  et  focis.  More  declared  that  he 
would  rather  burn  with  his  own  hand  his  early 
criticisms  on  ecclesiastical  abuses  than  that  they 
should  be  used  as  a  weapon  against  the  Church.  The 
common  danger  demanded  a  united  front  for  the 
defence  of  the  very  life  of  the  Church. 

The  great  theologians  of  Trent  and  their  successors 
busied  themselves  in  filling  up  lacunce,  in  classifying 
and  further  defining  dogmas,  to  make  them  bullet-proof 
against  the  enemy.     The  accepted  answer  to  current 

1  Ranke  declares  that  no  single  work  from  the  pen  of  an  orthodox 
writer  made  any  impression  during  the  period  which  elapsed  between 
the  date  of  Louis  XIV.  and  the  Revolution  {History  of  the  Popes,  vol.  ii. 
p.  292). 


360  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

heresy — the  anti- Protestant  limitation  of  dogma — 
compactly  stated,  was  the  serviceable  weapon  for  the 
Catholic  students.  Thus  equipped  they  applied  for 
marching  orders  from  their  general.  Few,  if  any, 
were  able  to  carry  on  the  deeper  intellectual  life, 
receptive  and  assimilative,  of  peaceful  civilization. 
The  creative  genius  within  the  Church  seemed  to 
concentrate  itself  almost  entirely  on  the  movement — 
at  once  spiritual  and  militant — represented  by  such 
saints  as  St.  Ignatius,  St.  Philip  Neri,  and  St.  Charles 
Borromeo.  So  far  as  intellectual  effort  was  displayed, 
its  function  was,  as  we  have  said,  defensive  and 
practical,  completing  the  statement  of  old  positions 
rather  than  surveying  new  ones.  The  extreme  of 
intellectual  completeness  thus  attained  was  in  reality 
in  its  very  nature  premature,  and  therefore  its  form 
was  temporary.  For  Catholic  thinkers  needed  time 
to  survey  completely  a  new  field  in  its  relation  to 
ancient  principles. 

To  some  extent  this  "  state  of  siege,"  as  it  has  been 
called,  continued  up  to  the  eighteenth  century,  and 
was  then  succeeded  by  a  period  in  which  the  anti- 
Protestant  weapons  were  no  longer  an  urgent  necessity, 
and  yet  remained  the  stock-in-trade  of  the  orthodox 
armoury.  The  "  Christian  and  Catholic  idea,"  to  use 
M.  Olle  Laprune's  phrase,  "  the  living  principle  of 
further  growth,  found  little  expression  in  the  France 
of  Louis  Ouinze."  It  was,  in  the  same  writer's  words, 
"veiled  by  its  own  adherents."  A  certain  fatigue 
after  the  long  struggle  perhaps  contributed  to  this 
result.  It  needed  freshness  and  energy  to  fight 
effectively  in  the  heavy  armour  which  was  no  longer 
needed.  But  Christian  thought  arose  again  suddenly, 
full  of  life  and  vigour,  at  the  crisis  which  the  closing 


NEWMAN  ON  CONSTRUCTIVE  RELIGIOUS  THOUGHT  361 

years  of  the  century  created,  and  seemed  to  shake  off 
its  trammels  and  move  freely  as  of  old  in  a  new  intel- 
lectual medium. 

The  new  apologetic,  coming  in  upon  the  wave  of 
a  great  reaction  against  the  French  Revolution  and 
its  intellectual  harbingers,  purported  to  blend  the 
"  Christian  idea  "  once  again  with  the  thought  of  the 
times — to  show  that  it  was  not  a  stranger  or  an  enemy 
to  the  lawful  aspirations  of  the  modern  world,  but  was 
even  necessary  for  their  satisfaction.  This  new  move- 
ment of  thought,  says  M.  Olle  Laprune,  had  to  M  detach 
itself  from  the  immediate  past,"  and  derive  its  inspira- 
tion not  from  a  period  of  torpor  and  numbness,  follow- 
ing on  another  period  of  militant  defence  of  positions 
long  since  determined,  but  from  epochs  of  life  and 
growth.  It  took  up,  for  the  most  part,  different 
ground  from  the  scholastic  treatises,  and  appealed  to 
the  original  source  of  their  life.  The  two  great 
creative  epochs — the  Middle  Ages,  and  the  Patristic 
Era,  when  the  Christian  idea  first  worked  out  its  true 
relations  with  Greek  thought — were  the  times  to 
which  the  glance  of  the  new  apologetic  was  turned, 
not  in  a  spirit  of  blind  repetition  of  ancient  phrases, 
but,  on  the  contrary,  as  a  modern  soldier  gains  from 
the  example  of  the  "  preux  chevalier  "  who  fought  with 
lance  and  shield,  the  spirit  though  not  the  weapons 
with  which  he  may  approach  his  own  campaign.  To 
realize  the  life  which  had  created  the  medieval  scho- 
lastic treatises  must  be  to  emancipate  Catholics  from  an 
unintelligent  and  rigid  perpetuation  of  their  inevitable 
limitations  ;  from  their  "  over-great  subtlety  "  which 
Leo  XIII.  once  contrasted  with  the  larger  wisdom  of 
St.  Thomas  Aquinas  himself.  Only  a  dead  body  is 
rigid.     And  its  rigidity  precedes  decay.     The  living 


362  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

Christian  idea  had  in  past  times  seized  and  penetrated 
the  thought  of  the  actual  civilized  world  in  which  it 
moved.     It  had  to  do  so  again. 

And  with  this  object  the  Catholic  thinkers  of  the 
early  nineteenth  century  laboured  at  a  time  when  the 
world  was  estranged  from  their  faith.  The  conquests 
of  physical  science  and  the  advances  of  critical  research 
were  slowly  making  definite  that  conception  of  the 
empirical  method  applied  to  the  universe,  regarded  as 
a  developing  organism,  which  is  characteristic  of  our 
age.  The  philosophy  of  history  and  its  critical  study 
received  immense  development.  An  ascertainment  of 
the  laws  of  progress,  and  of  the  relation  of  phenomena 
to  their  environment,  based  on  an  induction  from  the 
facts  of  science  and  from  the  story  of  mankind,  was 
gradually  being  understood  as  the  key  to  a  scientific 
view  of  the  world.  Physical  science,  history,  criticism, 
archaeology,  these  were  the  fields  in  which  modern 
thought  and  research  were  exercising  themselves.  In 
all  those  fields  the  Catholics  laboured.  Three  men, 
as  we  know,  were  the  pioneers  of  the  movement — 
mainly  in  the  field  of  history — Chateaubriand,  de 
Maistre,  and  de  Bonald.  Chateaubriand  brought  the 
past  of  Christianity  to  life  again  and  depicted  its  life- 
giving  power  and  its  beneficence.  De  Maistre  and 
de  Bonald  in  different  ways  seized  upon  the  concep- 
tion of  evolution.  De  Maistre,  in  M.  Olle  Laprune's 
words,  "renewing  the  philosophy  of  history  of  Bossuet, 
applied  it  in  living  form  to  the  present.  '  Nothing,' 
he  urged,  '  is  improvized  in  the  social  and  political 
world.'  He  thus  anticipates  the  philosophy  [so-called] 
of  evolution  and  Taine's  manner  of  viewing  history." 
Bonald's  analysis  of  the  individual  reason  as  a  factor 
in  the  universal  reason,  both  exercised  on  the  primitive 


NEWMAN  ON  CONSTRUCTIVE  RELIGIOUS  THOUGHT  363 

tradition  which  came  from  God,  is  another  aspect  of 
the  same  philosophy. 

The  eighteenth  century  had  seen  the  Church 
identified  with  clerical  officialism  and  a  priesthood 
which,  though  including  admirable  individuals,  was  on 
the  whole  intellectually  and  even  morally  decadent. 
It  was  depressed  in  general  estimation.  It  could 
never — Goethe  had  maintained  at  the  time — hold  its 
own  again  among  the  great  and  cultivated.  These 
three  champions  of  the  Church,  on  the  other  hand, 
were  laymen,  statesmen,  men  whose  names  stood  high 
in  the  world  of  intellect,  noblemen  of  social  influence, 
great  figures  in  the  political  world.  De  Bonald's 
views  were  afterwards  developed  by  Lamennais  with 
unique  genius  and  eloquence.  "  The  clergy  adopted 
Chateaubriand  as  their  master.  The  author  of  Du 
Pape  was  another  leader  to  them."  He  was  quoted 
from  the  pulpit,  and  "a  new  view  of  politics  drawn 
from  Christianity  "  was  adopted  under  his  guidance. 
Lamennais,  the  successor  of  de  Bonald,  was  hailed  in 
18 1 7  as  a  second  Bossuet. 

During  the  years  which  succeeded,  up  to  the  very 
middle  of  the  century,  the  promise  thus  held  out 
seemed  in  a  fair  way  towards  realization.  In  spite 
of  the  catastrophe  of  Lamennais'  career  the  torrent 
of  Catholic  genius  was  too  strong  to  be  stemmed. 
Another  layman,  the  Comte  de  Montalembert, 
wore  not  unworthily  the  mantle  of  de  Maistre, 
and  developed  the  work  of  Chateaubriand.  Like 
them  he  was  a  considerable  social  figure,  a  prominent 
personage  in  the  political  world.  He  depicted,  as 
Chateaubriand  had  done,  the  glories  of  Christian  his- 
tory, his  chosen  field  being  the  records  of  monasti- 
cism.     Ozanam,  also  a  layman,  continued  the  work  of 


364  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

drawing  from  history  a  view  of  the  Christian  Church 
which  was  comprehensive  and  free  from  unfair  par- 
tisanship. Lacordaire  was,  in  M.  Olle  Laprune's 
opinion,  the  founder  of  a  distinct  class  of  apologists. 
And  he  might  claim  more  truly  than  Lamennais  to  be 
a  successor  to  Bossuet.  Pere  Gratry  brought  into 
philosophy  the  comparative  and  historical  method, 
and  was  "undeniably  in  France  the  great  Catholic 
philosopher  of  the  nineteenth  century."  Bautain,  in 
his  chair  of  philosophy  in  the  Colllge  Royal,  "  created 
a  philosophical  and  religious  movement,  sketched  a 
system,  brought  about  wonderful  conversions,  formed  a 
school,  and,  what  is  better,  a  society  of  living  thought 
and  feeling  [oTesprits  et  d'dmesy  Other  eminent 
leaders  and  many  distinguished  followers  were  to  be 
found  working  at  the  same  time,  with  the  same  enthu- 
siasm and  the  same  object — the  tracing  of  the  Chris- 
tian ideal  in  all  fields  of  human  activity.  Ravignan, 
Pere  Felix,  Dupanloup,  Gerbet,  Charles  Lenormant, 
Dom  Pitra,  Comte  de  Falloux,  Henri  Perreyve,  are 
only  a  few  among  those  whom  M.  Olle  Laprune 
claims  as  all  sharing  in  different  ways  in  the  same 
effort.  De  Tocqueville,  too,  though  like  Chateau- 
briand he  had  not  the  practical  personal  Christianity 
of  the  great  leaders,  took  his  share  in  the  intellectual 
movement. 

When  Leo  XII.  succeeded  Pius  in  1823,  this  move- 
ment of  ideas  had  begun  to  make  itself  felt ;  and  it 
imparted  a  largeness  and  hopefulness  of  Catholic 
thought  which  was  hailed  with  satisfaction  in  Rome. 
The  writers  had  shown,  together  with  the  freshness  of 
genius  of  a  de  Maistre  and  a  de  Bonald,  that  devotion 
to  the  Holy  See  which  marked  the  Du  Pape.  And 
the    Holy  Father  welcomed   the  volunteers  who   so 


NEWMAN  ON  CONSTRUCTIVE  RELIGIOUS  THOUGHT  365 

ably  defended  his  cause.  It  was  this  spirit  which 
kindled  the  intellect  and  imagination  of  our  own  Car- 
dinal Wiseman,  whose  mind  was  formed  in  Rome  at 
this  very  time. 

M.  Olle  Laprune  regards  the  year  1835  as 
marking  the  time  when  the  movement  first  became 
a  veritable  power  in  France.  Lacordaire  was 
then  thirty-three,  Ravignan  forty,  Montalembert 
and  Ozanam  in  their  twenties.  It  proceeded  with- 
out serious  let  or  hindrance  up  to  1852.  It  was 
perhaps  at  its  height  in  1845.  Lacordaire,  then  a 
Dominican  in  the  full  maturity  of  his  powers,  was 
giving  his  conferences  in  Notre  Dame.  Monta- 
lembert had  just  delivered  his  famous  address  on 
behalf  of  the  liberty  of  the  religious  orders  and  liberty 
of  teaching.  Ozanam  was  at  the  height  of  his  influ- 
ence as  professor  of  the  Sorbonne.  Ravignan,  at  the 
instance  of  Dupanloup,  had  published  his  work  on 
the  Jesuits.  The  genius  of  these  men  dominated 
the  French  Church  in  the  eyes  of  the  world ;  and 
French  Catholics  were  apparently  united  in  recog- 
nizing their  leadership. 

But  the  elements  of  division  were  all  along  pre- 
sent, though  for  the  time  they  were  latent.  Men 
will  work  together,  however  opposed  in  views  or 
temperament,  to  save  from  wreck  the  ship  which 
bears  them  all  alike.  But  when  the  danger  is  over, 
and  they  meet  daily  at  meals,  at  work,  at  recreation, 
without  this  strong  uniting  bond,  personal  antipathies, 
or  differences  of  tradition,  of  temperament,  of  view  or 
ideal,  eventually  become  apparent.  And  so  the  bright 
dawn  of  common  constructive  endeavour,  at  once 
intellectual  and  spiritual,  among  Catholics,  became 
overclouded  with  the  threatenings  of  dissension.    The 


366  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

allied  powers  of  Christian  genius  reinstated  the  influ- 
ence of  the  Church,  which  the  weapons  of  officialism 
and  a  too  conservative  scholasticism  had  been  power- 
less to  defend  against  the  "time-spirit."  But  in 
renewing  the  power  of  the  Church  they  had  re- 
newed that  also  of  the  officials  and  the  men  of  theo- 
logical routine.  The  old  Gallican  clergy,  especially 
representative  of  the  eighteenth  century  defects 
were  the  official  rulers  in  France.  The  old  difficulty 
that  a  good  deal  of  the  traditional  intellectual  armoury 
was  out  of  joint  with  the  times  was  revived  in  an 
aggravated  form.  And  if  it  was  out  of  harmony 
with  "the  times,"  so,  too,  it  was  in  a  measure 
opposed  to  the  genius  of  the  new  apologists.  The 
elements  both  of  numbing  inertia  and  of  blind  repres- 
sion were  present.  The  conflict  ensued,  as  old  as  the 
world,  between  those  who  were  the  real  efficient  intel- 
lectual support  of  Catholic  doctrine  in  contemporary 
controversy,  who  had  moreover  restored  the  influence 
of  Catholicism,  and  the  representatives  of  an  older 
intellectual  and  ecclesiastical  aristocracy.  The  mayors 
of  the  palace  had  come  to  the  front.  But  the  repre- 
sentatives of  the  old  order  refused  to  become  rots 
fainiants,  or  to  give  free  scope  to  the  newer 
school. 

The  machinery  of  ecclesiastical  authority,  for 
which  the  traditionalist  and  romantic  thinkers  had 
cleared  the  ground,  resumed  its  accustomed  groove. 
Incidental  errors  were  sought  out  and  condemned  in 
the  writings  of  Apologists  who  were  defending  the 
Church  by  novel  lines  of  thought.  By  a  curious  irony 
of  events  Lamennais,  who  had  done  so  much  to  increase 
the  moral  influence  of  the  papacy,  became,  through  his 
unbridled  liberalism,  the  first  victim  of  the  weapons  he 


NEWMAN  ON  CONSTRUCTIVE  RELIGIOUS  THOUGHT  367 

had  sharpened  anew,  and  was  censured  by  a  papal 
encyclical.  Hermes  and  Giinther  were  condemned  by 
the  Holy  See  for  excesses  in  the  direction  of  rational- 
ism. Bautain  was  condemned  by  his  Bishop  for  the 
opposite  extreme  of  "  fideism."  Rome  condemned  in 
Ubaghs,  and  in  Bonetty,  the  exaggerations  of  that 
defence  of  the  value  of  tradition  which  had  been  the 
very  means  of  reinstating  Catholic  thought  in  the  eyes 
of  the  world. 

These  condemnations  were  loyally  accepted  by  all 
Catholics.  But  a  marked  difference  of  view  became 
manifest  in  regard  to  the  real  bearing  of  such  acts  of 
authority  on  Catholic  speculation.  While  to  some 
they  were  signs  that  a  loyal  Catholic  should  desist 
from  the  endeavour  to  enter  into  the  thought  of  the 
nineteenth  century  and  meet  it  on  its  own  ground,  and 
should  simply  encase  himself  in  the  ready-made 
scholastic  defences,  to  others  they  were  but  a  reminder 
that  in  the  first  attempt,  however  useful  and  able,  to 
adapt  Catholic  thought  to  new  conditions,  incidental 
error  is  almost  inevitable.  This  latter  class  deprecated 
an  attitude,  visible  in  some  of  the  excessively  conserva- 
tive thinkers,  which  confined  its  appreciation  of  the 
censured  writers  to  the  detection  of  their  excesses  or 
errors  in  thought  and  expression,  and  was  not  alive  to 
the  great  importance  of  the  intellectual  movement 
among  Catholics  of  which  condemned  propositions 
might  be  but  incidental  defects  or  exaggerations.  St. 
Augustine's  polemic  against  Pelagius  was  not  the  less 
invaluable  because  Jansenius  could,  by  exaggerating 
portions  of  the  saint's  theory,  form  a  heresy.  Lines  of 
thought  which,  in  spite  of  occasional  error  or  in- 
accuracy in  their  expression,  were  really  calculated  to 
influence  the  age,  were  thus  regarded  by  one  class  as 


368  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

the  intellectual  hope  for  the  Catholic  schools  in  the 
future,  to  be  pruned,  amended,  and  freed  from  error, 
but  pursued  with  loyal  enthusiasm  ;  '  by  the  other 
class  they  were  viewed  as  suspect  and  tainted  with 
heterodoxy  and  to  be  kept  far  at  a  distance.  And 
these  two  views  were  the  basis  of  subsequent 
developments. 

The  new  intellectual  life,  which  seemed  welcome 
to  Rome  when  Leo.  XII.  received  Lamennais  with 
honour,  won  less  encouragement  from  ecclesiastical 
authority  during  the  reign  of  Gregory  XVI.  Un- 
doubtedly the  political  dangers  of  liberalism  at  this 
time  had  a  share  in  the  fear  which  supervened  at 
Rome  of  all  that  appeared  to  savour  of  free  thought. 
It  was  hard  completely  to  dissociate  the  speculative 
movement  from  the  practical.  And  the  revolution  of 
1848  appeared  to  confirm  the  worst  fears  of  the 
prophets  of  evil.  After  Pius  IX.'s  generous  attempts 
to  meet  the  liberal  politicians  of  Italy  halfway  had 
failed,  an  intensely  conservative  reaction  in  philosophy 
and  theology,  as  well  as  in  politics,  set  in  at  Rome. 
Liberalism  became  a  watchword  which  aroused  such 
bitter  memories  and  associations  that  the  more  dis- 
criminating judgments  of  an  earlier  time  were  for  a 
while  set  aside  by  many  influential  Catholic  writers  of 
the  school  represented  by  M.  Louis  Veuillot,  of  the 
Univers.  The  new  civilization  had  proved  itself,  it 
seemed,  the  enemy  of  the  Church.  The  neo- 
scholastic  revival  followed.     Some   of  its   promoters 

1  This  was  of  course  the  view  of  Cardinal  Newman.  So,  too,  M.  Olle" 
Laprune,  speaking  on  behalf  of  the  French  school  of  writers  to  which  he 
belongs,  says  that  "  the  errors  which  we  are  now  able  to  discern  and 
which  the  Church  has  condemned  "  are  no  reason  for  swerving  from  the 
attempt  "  to  find  out  how  the  Church  and  this  age  can  understand  one 
another,  love  one  another  and  reunite  "  (p.  76). 


NEWMAN  ON  CONSTRUCTIVE  RELIGIOUS  THOUGHT  369 

allied  themselves  to  absolutist  and  untheological 
writers  like  the  editor  of  the  Univers  in  carrying  out 
a  policy  of  non  posstimus  in  the  relations  of  the  Church 
with  the  modern  world.  The  profound  injustice  of 
the  policy  of  Cavour  and  Victor  Emmanuel,  in  their 
attack  on  the  States  of  the  Church  a  few  years  later, 
deepened  the  lines  of  this  general  policy,  and  made  its 
pursuit  among  many  Catholics  a  passion. 

Still     the     most     far-sighted    thinkers — such    as 
Dupanloup  and  Lacordaire — regarded  the  very  worst 
episodes  in  contemporary  history  as  quite  insufficient 
to   warrant  any  drawing  back  from    the    attempt   to 
bring  Catholic  thought  and  learning  abreast  of  the 
civilization  of  the  hour.     They   held   that   an   open- 
minded  and  candid  treatment  of  all  public  questions 
was  the  one  hope  for  Catholics,  even  if  better  days 
were  far  distant.     It  was,  however,  excessively  difficult 
for  Catholics  who  were  suffering  at  the  hands  of  an 
unscrupulous  foe  to  adopt  the  serene  impartiality  of 
the  critics  whose  standpoint  was  neutral,  and  who  were 
for  the  most  part  thinkers  rather  than  men  of  action. 
Catholics   in    France,    Germany,   England,  and  Italy 
came  to  be  divided  roughly  into  two  schools  of  thought 
— those  who  attempted  still  to  fit  Catholic  apologetics 
to   influence    the    modern    world,    and    those    who, 
exasperated  at  the  irreligious  tendencies  of  the  age, 
fell  back  on  older  intellectual  forms  and  treated  the 
modern   world   as   an    enemy.      The    works,    which 
professed  to  represent  scientific  theology,   and  were 
still  the  text-books  in  the  seminaries,  made  little  or  no 
systematic  attempt  to  incorporate  the  thought  of  the 
former  class  of  writers, — to  assimilate  the  new  apolo- 
getic.   It  was  indeed  still  largely  tolerated  by  authority  ; 
but  it  was  no  longer,  as  it  had  been,  in  special  favour  in 

2  B 


370  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

high  places.  It  barely  touched  the  theological  schools,1 
which  returned  definitely  to  the  old  groove,  to  the 
form  in  which  so  much  of  the  very  best  thought  of  the 
Church  in  the  past  was  enshrined,  but  which,  from  its 
very  logical  completeness  and  absoluteness  of  method, 
did  not  readily  assimilate  a  newer  culture.  The 
Munich  Brief  of  1863  tended  to  emphasize  the  wisdom 
of  "  standing  in  the  old  ways,"  and  the  subsequent 
Encyclical  and  Syllabus  told  in  the  same  direction. 
The  intransigeants  of  the  Univers  invoked  these  official 
utterances  against  the  wisdom,  and  even  against  the 
orthodoxy,  of  the  new  apologists. 

The  attitude  of  which  I  have  spoken  as  character- 
istic of  the  more  conservative  thinkers  in  the  'sixties, 
even  if  it  was  inevitable,  was  attended  by  serious 
dangers.  The  strenuous  enforcement  of  the  principle 
of  authority  from  1855  to  1870  became  more  and  more 
closely  bound  up  with  the  tendency  to  identify  philo- 
sophical thought  among  Catholics  with  the  obedient 
acceptance  of  a  system.  And  that  system,  while  its 
fundamental  principles  were  profound  and  true,  fell 
short  in  its  very  truths  of  many  vital  issues  in  the 
thought  of  the  age.  A  loss  of  reality,  and  even  of 
deep  sincerity,  in  Catholic  thought  appeared  to  many 
to  follow  as  a  consequence.  This  danger  was  per- 
ceived by  the  abler  thinkers  of  all  schools.  Among 
Englishmen,  so  devoted  a  scholastic  theologian  as  Mr. 
Ward,  of  the  Dublin  Review,  deprecated  it  in  language 
quite  as  strong  as  was  used  by  Mr.  Simpson  or  Lord 
Acton  in   the   pages   of  the   Rambler?     It  was   not 

1  Perrone  no  doubt  took  some  account  of  it.  But  it  can  hardly  be 
said  that  he  did  so  with  special  success. 

2  *  Three-fourths  of  the  arguments  in  ordinary  text-books  seem  to  me 
fictitious,"  writes  Mr.  Ward.  M  The  writer  never  asks  himself  the 
question  whether  they  arc  valid  arguments,  but  merely  whether  they  will 


NEWMAN  ON  CONSTRUCTIVE  RELIGIOUS  THOUGHT  371 

entirely  overlooked  even  among  the  neo-scholastic 
philosophers  themselves.  Father  Kleutgen  urged,  in 
his  great  work  on  Scholastic  Philosophy,  the  necessity 
of  supplementing  that  philosophy  by  a  treatment  of 
contemporary  problems  which  should  be  living  and 
real.  "We  have  never  asserted,"  he  writes,  "  that  all 
questions  now  raised  were  solved  in  times  past,  nor 
have  we  expressed  a  doubt  that  for  their  solution  the 
ancient  philosophy  might  derive  advantage  from  the 
modern."  ■ 

On  the  other  hand,  the  genuine  thought  and 
research  of  the  new  apologists  had  reached  a  stage  at 
which  a  new  difficulty  was  arising  unknown  to  the 
early  years  of  the  century.  The  triumphant  refuta- 
tion of  anti-Christian  calumnies,  by  means  of  Christian 
genius  and  candid  research,  could  not  arrest  itself  at 
the  moment  at  which  the  apologists'  purposes  were 
gained.  Historical  research  once  begun  must  be  pur- 
sued. And  history  did  not  always  tell  a  tale  favour- 
able to  the  Popes  or  to  the  views  accepted  among 
Catholic  theologians  or  historians  in  the  past.  A 
movement  more  deeply  in  accord  with  the  time  spirit 
was  succeeding  to  the  first  place  of  the  new  apologetic 
among  Catholics; — the  candid  and  critical  sifting  of 
history,  with  trust  that  in  the  long  run  the  cause  of 
the  Church  must  profit,  but  with  the  immediate  pro- 
spect of  revising  not  a  few  cherished  traditions.  From 
this  many  Catholics  recoiled. 

Its  necessity  was  from  the  nature  of  the  case  not 
apparent  to  the  multitude.      Many  of  those  in  high 

pass  muster  and  impose  upon  ingenuous  youth"  (W.  G.  Ward  and  the 
Catholic  Revival^  p.  202). 

1  See  La  Filosofia  Antica,  esposta  e  difesa  del  P.  Giuseppe  Kleutgen 
Versione  del  Tedesco,  Roma,  vol.  i.  pp.  25,  114 ;  vol.  ii.  p.  256. 


372  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

places  who  had  welcomed  in  the  writings  of  de 
Maistre  and  Lacordaire,  direct  apologetic,  though  it 
was  on  new  lines,  as  winning  from  the  world  at  large 
a  new  respect  for  Catholicism,  shrank  from  the 
vivisection  of  cherished  traditions  and  long-received 
historical  positions  which  the  new  method  was 
inaugurating.  They  could  not  believe  that  so  painful 
an  operation  was  calculated  to  preserve  and  stimulate 
life.  And  the  new  conclusions  affected  in  some  cases, 
not  indeed  theological  dogma,  but  its  explication. 

Here  we  have  the  true  beginning  of  the  most 
serious  difficulties  which  still  lie  before  us  in  our 
own  time.  At  this  point  Lord  Acton  intervened. 
He  was  a  Catholic  by  birth,  with  a  true  loyalty 
to  his  ancestral  faith,  but  with  no  interest  in  theo- 
logy proper.  In  the  days  of  his  youth  he  showed 
a  passion  for  research  which  was  in  keeping  with 
his  German  descent,  and  laid  the  foundations  of  his 
encyclopedic  reading.  His  enthusiasms  were  for 
the  modern  ideal  of  liberty  and  for  learning,  and  both 
the  optimism  and  the  medievalism  of  the  new  apologists 
irritated  him.  The  somewhat  unfairly  critical  account 
of  their  labours,  which  he  published  in  1861  in  the 
Home  and  Foreign  Review,  and  his  plea  for  work  of  a 
different  kind  in  the  future,  indicate  the  turning-point 
in  the  Catholic  intellect  of  the  century  from  the  work 
of  apologetic  to  that  of  an  adaptation  of  Catholic 
thought  to  the  results  of  the  new  scientific  and 
historical  methods. 

A  school  of  writers  arose  [so  writes  the  Home  and  Foreign 
Review  concerning  the  nineteenth  century]  strongly  imbued 
with  a  horror  of  the  calumnies  of  infidel  philosophers  and 
hostile  controversialists  and  animated  by  a  sovereign  desire 
to  revive  and  fortify  the  spirit  of  Catholics.     They  became 


NEWMAN  ON  CONSTRUCTIVE  RELIGIOUS  THOUGHT  373 

literary  advocates.  Their  only  object  was  to  accomplish  the 
great  work  before  them,  and  they  were  often  careless  in  state- 
ment, rhetorical  and  illogical  in  argument,  too  positive  to  be 
critical,  and  too  confident  to  be  precise.  In  this  school  the 
present  generation  of  Catholics  was  educated  ;  to  it  they  owe 
the  ardour  of  their  zeal,  the  steadfastness  of  their  faith,  and 
their  Catholic  views  of  history,  politics,  and  literature.  The 
services  of  these  writers  have  been  very  great.  They  restored 
the  balance,  which  was  leaning  terribly  against  religion,  both 
in  politics  and  letters.  They  created  a  Catholic  opinion  and 
a  great  Catholic  literature,  and  they  conquered  for  the  Church 
a  very  powerful  influence  in  European  thought.  The  word 
"  ultramontane "  was  revived  to  designate  this  school,  and 
that  restricted  term  was  made  to  embrace  men  as  different  as 
de  Maistre  and  de  Bonald,  Lamennais  and  Montalembert, 
Balmez  and  Donoso  Cortes,  Stolberg  and  Schlegel,  Phillips 
and  Taparelli. 

Learning  has  passed  on  beyond  the  range  of  these  men's 
vision.  Their  greatest  strength  was  in  the  weakness  of 
their  adversaries,  and  their  own  faults  were  eclipsed  by  the 
monstrous  errors  against  which  they  fought.  But  scientific 
methods  have  now  been  so  perfected  and  have  come  to  be 
applied  in  so  cautious  and  so  fair  a  spirit  that  the  apologists 
of  the  last  generation  have  collapsed  before  them.  Investiga- 
tions have  become  so  impersonal,  so  colourless,  so  free  from 
the  prepossessions  which  distort  truth,  from  predetermined 
aims  and  foregone  conclusions,  that  their  results  can  only 
be  met  by  investigations  in  which  the  same  methods  are 
yet  more  completely  and  conscientiously  applied.  The 
sounder  scholar  is  invincible  by  the  brilliant  rhetorician  ;  and 
the  eloquence  and  ingenuity  of  de  Maistre  and  Schlegel 
would  be  of  no  avail  against  researches  pursued  with  perfect 
mastery  of  science  and  singleness  of  purpose.  The  apologist's 
armour  would  be  vulnerable  at  the  point  where  his  religion 
and  his  science  were  forced  into  artificial  union.  Again,  as 
science  widens  and  deepens,  it  escapes  from  the  grasp  of 
dilettantism.  The  training  of  a  skilled  labourer  has  become 
indispensable  for  the  scholar,  and  science  yields  its  results  to 
none  but  those  who  have  mastered  its  methods. 


374  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

Herein  consists  the  distinction  between  the  apologists  we 
have  described  and  that  school  of  writers  and  thinkers  which 
is  now  growing  up  in  foreign  countries,  and  on  the  triumph  of 
which  the  position  of  the  Church  in  modern  society  depends. 
While  she  was  surrounded  by  men  whose  learning  was  sold 
to  the  service  of  untruth,  her  defenders  naturally  adopted  the 
artifices  of  the  advocate,  and  wrote  as  if  they  were  pleading 
for  a  human  cause.  It  was  their  concern  only  to  promote 
those  precise  kinds  and  portions  of  knowledge  which  would 
confound  an  adversary  or  support  her  claim.  But  learning 
ceased  to  be  hostile  to  Christianity  when  it  ceased  to  be  an 
instrument  of  controversy — when  facts  came  to  be  acknow- 
ledged no  longer  because  they  were  useful,  but  simply 
because  they  were  true.  Religion  had  no  occasion  to  rectify 
the  results  of  learning  when  irreligion  had  ceased  to  pervert 
them,  and  the  old  weapons  of  controversy  became  repulsive 
as  soon  as  they  had  ceased  to  be  useful.1 

The  underlying  weakness  of  this  plausible  pro- 
gramme is  that  it  supposes  a  complete  impartiality  in 
the  historical  researches  of  the  scientific  world  which 
has  never  had  real  existence,  and  least  of  all  in  1861. 
That  the  bias  which  made  irreligion  pervert  the 
results  of  learning  was  dead,  is  a  supposition  which 
subsequent  events  have  not  justified.  The  absolute 
dispassionateness  of  modern  methods,  while  largely 
realized  in  physical  science,  has  constituted  an  aim 
rather  than  an  achievement  in  the  fields  of  history  and 
criticism. 

Cardinal  Newman  never  shared  with  Acton  any 
such  trust  in  the  ideal  justice  of  the  conclusions  of 
the  intellect  in  any  society  of  fallen  men — even  those 
most  devoted  to  the  sciences.  Yet  his  intense  sym- 
pathy with  the  impartiality  and  thoroughness  of 
research  advocated  by  Acton  and  his  friends,  made 

1  Home  and  Foreign  Review ',  vol.  i.  p.  513. 


NEWMAN  ON  CONSTRUCTIVE  RELIGIOUS  THOUGHT  375 

him  for  years  co-operate  in  some  degree  in  their 
labours.  His  views  on  the  subject  are  of  material 
assistance  in  denning  the  true  scope  and  method 
of  a  creative  theology  suited  to  our  times,  and 
I  shall  attempt  to  give  some  outline  of  them  based  on 
his  writings  of  the  'fifties  and  'sixties.  They  show,  to 
put  it  briefly,  a  profound  sympathy  with  the  plea  for 
thoroughness,  impartiality  and  freedom  of  research,  in 
the  fields  marked  out  by  the  individual  sciences.  But, 
on  the  other  hand,  the  idea  that  freedom  of  intellect, 
in  its  survey  of  the  whole  range  of  knowledge  and  of 
life,  is  likely  either  to  beget  impartiality  or  to  lead  to 
the  highest  truth,  is  in  Newman's  eyes  quite  untenable. 
Pure  unbiassed  intellect  is  not  an  asset  to  be  counted 
on  in  fallen  man.  Assumptions  and  prepossessions 
are  not  the  monopoly  of  the  narrow  or  the  ultra- 
orthodox.  As  the  heart  of  man  must  be  renewed  to 
make  it  love  what  is  good  and  pure  and  congenial  to 
our  higher  nature,  so  the  intellect  must  be  disciplined 
and  purified — rather  than  left  in  a  state  of  mere  free- 
dom— to  enable  it  to  keep  the  simple  eye  for  truth. 

Let  us  first  consider  this  last  point  which  lies  at 
the  root  of  his  teaching. 

The  modern  spirit  which  inspired  the  liberal  writers 
with  such  enthusiasm  was  in  its  general  tendency, 
Newman  held,  irreligious.  It  tended  to  the  simple 
negation  of  all  religious  truth.  If  it  had  led  to  the 
perception  of  new  methods  of  ascertaining  facts,  and 
to  the  discovery  of  new  truths,  it  had  also  lost  both 
older  and  more  sacred  truths  themselves  and  over- 
looked the  clue  to  their  discovery.  It  may  be  said 
that  in  religion  as  in  art  the  highest  perceptions  may 
become  less  general  owing  to  the  circumstances  of  the 
time.     In  neither  is  there  an  absolute  law  of  progress. 


376  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

And  if  we  use  the  word  "  liberalism  "  as  denoting  the 
spirit  of  the  age,  Newman  maintained  that  it  is  nothing 
else  than  that  "  deep  plausible  scepticism "  which 
characterized  "the  educated  lay  world."  He  regards 
this  "  scepticism  "  as  being  due  to  the  absolutely  free 
exercise  of  human  reason.  Reason  left  entirely  to 
itself  issues  not  in  conclusions  in  the  highest  sense 
rational,  but  in  rationalism.  It  attempts  to  decide 
questions  beyond  its  competence.  Rationalistic 
liberalism  is  the  "  exercise  of  thought  on  subjects  in 
which  from  the  constitution  of  the  human  mind  thought 
cannot  be  brought  to  a  successful  issue."  Newman 
speaks  of  this  sceptical  tendency  as  "  the  development 
of  human  reason  as  practically  exercised  by  the  natural 
man."  He  finds  such  an  issue  of  the  free  play  of 
human  reason  to  be  no  new  phenomenon,  but  only 
the  repetition  of  what  has  already  been  visible  in 
history.  "  Actually  and  historically,"  he  writes,  "... 
its  tendency  is  towards  simple  unbelief  in  matters  of 
religion.  No  truth  however  sacred  can  stand  against 
it  in  the  long  run,  and  hence  it  is  that  in  the  pagan 
world  when  our  Lord  came,  the  last  traces  of  the 
religious  knowledge  of  former  times  were  fast  dis- 
appearing from  those  portions  of  the  world  in  which 
the  intellect  had  been  active  and  had  had  a  career." 
And  this  tendency  of  the  intellect  is  still  more  marked 
in  the  educated  world  at  large  in  our  own  times. 
"  Outside  the  Catholic  Church,"  he  continues,  "  things 
are  tending  with  far  greater  rapidity  than  of  old  time, 
from  the  circumstances  of  the  age,  to  atheism  in  one 
shape  or  another." 

His  attack  is  of  course  not  on  the  lawful  use  of 
reason,  but  on  its  constant  abuse  by  fallen  human 
nature  if  it  is  left  entirely  free.     And  if,  still  pursuing 


NEWMAN  ON  CONSTRUCTIVE  RELIGIOUS  THOUGHT  377 

the  method  of  close  scrutiny  of  facts,  of  causes  and 
effects,  we  seek  for  the  source  of  this  abuse,  of  this 
irreligious  tendency  of  the  human  reason  in  existing 
human  beings,  we  find  it  to  be  partly  that  reason  left 
to  itself  in  fact  steps  beyond  its  lawful  province,  and 
partly  that  it  adopts  the  secular  assumptions  or  maxims 
naturally  resulting  from  the  action  on  our  imagination 
of  this  visible  world,  which  is  so  urgent  in  its  claim 
on  our  attention.1  Such  a  course,  though  foreign 
to  the  cautious  and  accurate  use  of  the  reason,  is 
the  constant  result  of  the  action  of  secular  society, 
which  perverts  the  best  gifts  of  God.  "  Assumptions 
and  false  reasonings  are  received  without  question  as 
certain  truths  on  the  credit  of  alternate  appeals,  and 
mutual  cheers  and  imprimaturs."  This  was  his 
reiterated  expression  of  the  same  view  in  his  eighty- 
eighth  year.  Reason  amid  such  influences  easily 
ignores  that  inner  voice  of  the  "  conscience "  which 
testifies  to  the  existence  and  holiness  of  God  as  "the 
shadow  is  a  proof  of  the  substance."  ■  Newman  would 
seem  to  have  shared  the  view  urged  with  so  much 
force  by  Professor  Eucken,3  that  this  age  of  science 
has  obscured  for  our  contemporaries  the  deeper  signi- 
ficance of  the  moral  consciousness  and  of  the  human 
personality.  The  reason  of  the  age  moves  on,  gaining 
assurance  from  its  own  successes  in  the  field  of 
scientific  inquiry,  and  forms  its  judgment  of  the  world 

1  "  This  so-called  reason  is  in  Scripture  designated  '  the  wisdom  of 
the  world,'  that  is,  the  reasoning  of  secular  minds  about  religion  based 
upon  secular  maxims  which  are  intrinsically  foreign  to  it." — University 
Sermons,  third  edition,  p.  15. 

2  See  private  letter  to  W.  G.  Ward,  quoted  in  W.  G.  Ward  and  the 
Catholic  Revival. 

3  See  Revue  de  Metaphysigue  et  de  Morale,  1897  ;  article,  "  La 
Relation  de  la  Philosophic  au  Mouvement  Religieux  du  Temps  Present." 


378  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

as  a  whole  without  taking  due  account  of  phenomena 
which  are  all-important.  And  then  it  transfers  to  its 
defective  view  of  the  whole  that  self-confidence  which 
it  has  acquired  from  its  powerful  grasp  of  the  part. 
In  its  satisfaction  it  hardly  looks  for — at  least  it 
fails  to  see — a  large  field  of  psychological  phenomena 
which  are  themselves  intimations  of  great  realities. 
These  phenomena  are  unmistakable,  though  bathed  in 
twilight.  They  are  visible  to  the  truly  philosophical 
reason,  but  they  escape  the  observation  of  those  who 
are  most  occupied  with  the  lucid  and  successful  pro- 
cesses of  physical  science,  much  as  a  man  may  from 
the  very  intensity  of  the  light  covering  one  area  be 
apt  to  overlook  the  darker  space  adjoining  it.  "  The 
religious  man,"  wrote  Newman,  "  sees  much  which  is 
unseen  by  the  non-religious."  *  "  The  main  difficulty 
for  an  inquirer  is  firmly  to  hold  that  there  is  a  living 
God,  in  spite  of  the  darkness  which  surrounds  Him, 
the  Creator,  Witness  and  Judge  of  men."2 

The  tyranny  of  the  world  of  science  and  of  sense, 
and  its  tendency  to  prevail  in  the  counsels  of  reason 
against  belief  in  the  impalpable  realities  of  the  super- 
natural world,  were  described  by  him  in  a  famous 
lecture  delivered  in  Dublin  in  1859. 

The  physical  nature  lies  before  us,  patent  to  the  sight, 
ready  to  the  touch,  appealing  to  the  senses  in  so  unequivocal 
a  way  that  the  science  which  is  founded  upon  it  is  as  real  to 
us  as  the  fact  of  our  personal  existence.  But  the  phenomena, 
which  are  the  basis  of  morals  and  religion,  have  nothing  of 
this  luminous  evidence.  Instead  of  being  obtruded  upon  our 
notice,  so  that  we  cannot  possibly  overlook  them,  they  are 
dictates  either  of  conscience  or  of  faith.  They  are  faint 
shadows  and  tracings,  certain  indeed,  but  delicate,  fragile  and 

1  In  a  letter  to  the  present  writer. 

8  Grammar  of  Assent,  fifth  edition,  p.  497. 


NEWMAN  ON  CONSTRUCTIVE  RELIGIOUS  THOUGHT  379 

almost  evanescent,  which  the  mind  recognizes  at  one  time, 
not  at  another,  discerns  when  it  is  calm,  loses  when  it  is  in 
agitation.  The  reflection  of  sky  and  mountains  in  the  lake 
is  a  proof  that  sky  and  mountains  are  around  it ;  but  the 
twilight,  or  the  mist,  or  the  sudden  storm  hurries  away  the 
beautiful  image,  which  leaves  behind  it  no  memorial  of  what 
it  was.  Something  like  this  are  the  moral  law  and  the  infor- 
mations of  faith,  as  they  present  themselves  to  individual 
minds.  Who  can  deny  the  existence  of  conscience  ?  Who 
does  not  feel  the  force  of  its  injunctions  ?  But  how  dim  is 
the  illumination  in  which  it  is  invested,  and  how  feeble  its 
influence,  compared  with  that  evidence  of  sight  and  touch 
which  is  the  foundation  of  physical  science  !  How  easily  can 
we  be  talked  out  of  our  clearest  views  of  duty,  how  does  this 
or  that  moral  precept  crumble  into  nothing  when  we  rudely 
handle  it,  how  does  the  fear  of  sin  pass  off  from  us  as  quickly 
as  the  glow  of  modesty  dies  away  from  the  countenance,  and 
then  we  say,  "  It  is  all  superstition  !  "  However,  after  a  time 
we  look  round,  and  then  to  our  surprise  we  see,  as  before,  the 
same  law  of  duty,  the  same  moral  precepts,  the  same  protests 
against  sin,  appearing  over  against  us,  in  their  old  places,  as 
if  they  never  had  been  brushed  away,  like  the  divine  hand- 
writing upon  the  wall  at  the  banquet.  Then  perhaps  we 
approach  them  rudely,  and  inspect  them  irreverently,  and 
accost  them  sceptically,  and  away  they  go  again,  like  so  many 
spectres,  shining  in  their  cold  beauty,  but  not  presenting  them- 
selves bodily  to  us,  for  our  inspection,  so  to  say,  of  their 
hands  and  their  feet.  And  thus  these  awful,  supernatural, 
bright,  majestic,  delicate  apparitions,  much  as  we  may  in  our 
hearts  acknowledge  their  sovereignty,  are  no  match  as  a 
foundation  of  science  for  the  hard,  palpable,  material  facts 
which  make  up  the  province  of  physics.1 

The  human  intellect,  then,  if  it  is  to  be  brought  to 

1  This  lecture  is  not  one  of  the  original  series  on  "  The  Scope  and 
Nature  of  University  Education  "  delivered  in  185 1.  It  was  delivered 
to  the  Dublin  Medical  School  shortly  before  Dr.  Newman  ceased  to  be 
Rector  of  the  University.  It  is  reprinted  in  The  Idea  of  a  University, 
p.  514. 


380  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

see  deeply  and  in  just  proportion,  must,  like  the  rest 
of  human  nature,  be  rescued  from  the  tyranny,  from 
the  blinding  vividness  of  the  world  of  sense  and  of 
science.  It  must  be  "  reborn  .  .  .  bathed  in  a  new 
element,  reconsecrated  to  [its]  Maker." 

But  where  is  the  power  which  will  enable  us  to 
effect  this  new  birth  ?  We  need,  in  the  first  instance, 
a  force  which  shall  effectually  control  and  resist  the 
rationalism  to  which  our  nature  so  fatally  tends  under 
the  overpowering  influence  of  the  world  of  sense 
which  is  ever  before  our  eyes.  Where  is  the  "con- 
crete representative  of  things  invisible,  which  would 
have  the  force  and  toughness  necessary  to  be  a  break- 
water against  the  deluge  "  ? 

History  shows  that  other  forces  have  been  trusted 
for  this  work  besides  the  Catholic  Church.  And  they 
have  failed.  Three  hundred  years  ago  established 
Churches  were  relied  on.  Now  "the  crevices  of 
those  establishments  are  admitting  the  enemy." 
Scripture  was  trusted.  But  experience  has  proved 
that  a  book,  even  a  divine  book,  cannot  do  what  needs 
an  active  living  power  ;  "  cannot  make  a  stand  against 
the  wild  living  intellect  of  man." 

Thus  Newman  turns  to  the  one  Church  which 
takes  the  resolute  stand  involved  in  its  claim  to  inde- 
fectibility,  to  rescue  "  freedom  of  thought  .  .  .  from 
its  own  suicidal  excesses."  If  the  representatives  of 
the  Church  are  on  occasion  harsh,  peremptory,  severe, 
absolute,  even  unwise  in  their  uncompromising  efforts 
to  check  intellectual  excess,  these  are  the  defects  of 
their  qualities.  For  the  Church  is  the  "  face  to  face 
antagonist "  whose  mission  is  to  "  withstand  and  baffle 
the  fierce  energy  of  passion,  and  the  all-corroding, 
all-dissolving  scepticism  of  the  intellect  in  religious 


NEWMAN  ON  CONSTRUCTIVE  RELIGIOUS  THOUGHT   381 

inquiries."     In    such  a   battle   peremptoriness   and  a 
general  policy  which  will  be  hard  upon  some  indi- 
viduals   would    be   inevitable,    even    if    ecclesiastical 
authorities   were   perfect.     But,   in    fact,   they   them- 
selves,   though    the    instruments    of    a   superhuman 
power,  have  the  faults  of  human  beings.     It  is  the 
mission  of  the  Church  to  keep  insistently  and  per- 
emptorily reminding  the  world,  by  her  saints  and  by 
her  visible  polity  and  rule,  of  the  truths  which  left  to 
itself  it  forgets.     The  Church  has  two  offices  in  this 
connexion.      First  it  reminds  men  of  realities  which 
the    atmosphere   of    secular   thought   leads   them   to 
forget  or  ignore.     It  "bathes"  the  human  reason  in 
a  new  atmosphere  and  new  associations.     But  it  has 
another  also,  which  Newman  insists  on  in  some  detail — 
namely,  the  healthy  restraint  of  the  speculative  intel- 
lect, which  is  as  prone  to  excess  as  any  other  faculty. 
There  is  the  error  arising  from  want  of  proportion  or 
perspective,  as  well  as  the  error  of  simply  ignoring  a 
true  principle.      We  may  pursue  particular  trains  of 
thought  or  speculation  so  intemperately  as  to  lose  the 
sense  ofproportion  between  them  and  the  whole,  and  to 
damage  that  "judgment"  which  Newman  regards  as  the 
highest  faculty  of  the  intellect.    Newman,  like  Fdnelon, 
is  alive  to  the  dangers  of  what  may  be  called  intellectual 
gluttony.      "  The  mind,"  writes  Fenelon,   "  needs  to 
fast  as  well  as  the  body  ;  it  is  subject  to  an  intemper- 
ance of  its  own  .  .  .  sapere  ad  sobrietatem  is  a  deep 
truth." *      The   intellect    is    thus    like   other    natural 
energies   and    passions,   which   are   purified    first    by 
self-restraint  and   next  by  the  positive  influences  of 
religion.     Newman  appears  to  hold  that  within  certain 
limits  the  intellectual  nature  may  benefit  from  a  certain 

1  Letters  to  Men,  p.  126  (Rivington,  1S86). 


382  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

restraining  action  of  the  Church,  even  if  in  the  par- 
ticular case  ecclesiastical  authority  is  unjust,  or  if  the 
views  whose  expression  is  checked  are  largely  true. 
Thus  he  speaks  not  only  of  the  "  false  assumptions  " 
of  the  reason  adopted  under  the  influence  of  secular 
thought,  but  of  its  "  excesses  "  when  left  to  itself,  and 
of  its  health  when  it  is  restrained.  "It  thrives  and 
is  joyous,"  he  writes,  "  under  the  terrible  blows  of  the 
divinely  fashioned  weapon,  and  is  never  so  much 
itself  as  when  it  has  been  lately  overthrown." 

So  much  may  be  said  as  to  the  intellect  itself 
regarded  simply  as  an  instrument  for  ascertaining  or 
preserving  the  truth  on  matters  of  religion.  But 
Newman,  in  his  analysis  of  the  Church,  regards  her 
not  only  as  the  repository  of  truth,  but  as  a  polity  to 
be  ruled  with  a  view  to  the  religious  welfare  of  her 
subjects.  And  that  welfare  includes  primarily  their 
devotional  life.1  Thus  authority  may  rightly  check  the 
intellect  not  merely  for  falling  into  excesses  which  are 
untrue  or  misleading,  but  for  pressing  on  the  com- 
munity speculations  which  upset  the  faith  and 
devotional  life  of  the  masses.  As  a  strong  force, 
which  if  gradually  applied  would  take  us  rapidly  in 
the  direction  in  which  we  want  to  go,  may  be  so 
abruptly  administered  as  to  kill  us  by  the  shock,  so 
truths  may  be  so  abruptly  urged  as  to  be  dangerous 
to  the  Christian  community. 

These  general  principles,  so  often  forgotten  by  the 
"  liberal  "  Catholics,  were,  as  it  were,  the  preamble  to 
Newman's  views  on  the  Church's  attitude  towards  the 
scientific  movement  of  our  time,  taken  in  its  wider 
sense  as  including  the  scientific  study  of  history  and  of 
biblical  exegesis. 

1  This  point  is  insisted  on  in  the  Preface  of  1877  in  the  Via  Media. 


NEWMAN  ON  CONSTRUCTIVE  RELIGIOUS  THOUGHT  383 

But  when  he  passed  to  the  definitely  limited 
sphere  of  scientific  inquiries  themselves,  he  was 
prepared  to  go  very  far  with  the  principles  urged 
by  Lord  Acton  in  the  Rambler  and  Home  and 
Foreign,  and  was  unable  practically  to  agree  with 
the  ultra-conservative  scholastics.  Just  as  false  and 
confident  conclusions  drawn  in  the  name  of  science, 
but  really  beyond  the  warrant  of  science,  were  rightly 
checked  by  the  Church  as  the  guardian  and  em- 
bodiment of  spiritual  truth,  so  confident  conclusions 
drawn  in  the  name  of  theology,  but  really  beyond  the 
warrant  of  theology  and  outside  its  province,  must  be 
gradually  rectified  by  the  lessons  of  true  science  and 
experience.  It  was  the  colouring  of  scientific  investi- 
gations by  the  spirit  and  tone  of  a  secularist  age  that 
he  regarded  as  unphilosophical.  But  absolute  candour 
(and  correlatively  freedom)  in  scientific  inquiry  proper 
was  not  only  not  opposed  to  this  view,  it  was  even  a 
part  of  it ;  for  the  secularist  assumptions  were  often 
themselves  an  uncandid  addition  to  strictly  scientific 
inquiries.  Regarding  then  the  intellect  no  longer 
as  an  active  force,  impregnated  with  the  secular 
passions  and  associations  of  the  hour,  moving  dis- 
cursively amid  the  whole  field  of  knowledge,  and 
generalizing  as  to  the  meaning  of  life,  but  as  our 
genuinely  rational  nature,  disciplined  and  healthy, 
exercised  in  limited  and  isolated  provinces  of  scientific 
and  historical  investigation,  he  advocated  its  freedom. 
"Free  thought,"  commonly  so-called,  meant  licence 
for  all  indulgence  in  intellectual  passion,  and  prejudice 
in  the  sacred  name  of  liberty,  and  its  expression 
without  regard  for  the  effect  of  such  utterances  on  the 
community.  This  was  the  high  road  to  scepticism. 
But  free  discussions  among  the  learned,  dictated  by 


384  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

the  sole  desire  for  light,  were  on  a  different  footing. 
Without  them  no  real  adjustment  between  the  religious 
and  secular  sciences  was  possible. 

"Free  discussion,"  he  wrote,  "is  simply  necessary 
for  progress  in  science." 1  Discipline  and  a  degree  of 
thwarting  might  be  valuable  in  imparting  to  inquirers 
the  caution  which  should  keep  the  reason  within  its 
lawful  province.  But  within  that  province  freedom 
for  the  trained  and  disciplined  intellect  was  essential 
in  the  search  for  truth.  And  as  to  theological  opposi- 
tion, his  quick  eye  noted  that  the  maxims  on  which  it 
rested  were  in  some  cases  framed  before  our  new  view 
of  the  possibilities  of  the  enlargement  of  empirical 
knowledge  was  clearly  contemplated.  This  fact  would 
suggest  the  necessity  of  a  revision,  under  the  criticism 
of  science  both  physical  and  historical,  of  such  maxims. 
He  illustrated  the  necessity  for  a  change  by  a  simple 
and  unanswerable  instance.  The  fundamental  idea  of 
the  Ptolemaic  system,  he  pointed  out,  was  regarded 
by  our  ancestors  as  though  it  had  been  part  of  revela- 
tion. "  It  was  generally  received,"  he  wrote,  "as  if 
the  Apostles  had  expressly  delivered  it  both  orally 
and  in  writing,  as  a  truth  of  revelation,  that  the  earth 
was  stationary."  This  fact  is  of  course  the  most 
effective  defence  of  the  theologians  who  censured 
Galileo  in  1616.2  But  the  disproof  of  the  supposition 
on  which  they  acted  carried  with  it  the  far  reaching 
conclusion  that  theologians  of  the  very  highest 
authority  may  regard  as  heretical  what  science  subse- 
quently shows  to  be  true.  He  thus  entered  a  note  of 
warning  against  attaching  such  finality  to  the  existing 

1  In  his  lecture  on  "Christianity  and  Scientific  Investigation,"  1855. 

2  In  one  of  their  propositions  heliocentricism  was  condemned,  not 
merely  as  erroneous,  but  as  formally  heretical. 


NEWMAN  ON  CONSTRUCTIVE  RELIGIOUS  THOUGHT  385 

form  in  which  the  results  of  theological  reasoning  are 
authoritatively  stated,  as  might  first  check  the  pursuit 
of  true  lines  of  research,  and  next  give  that  shock  to 
the  faith  of  the  many  which  arises  from  a  statement 
being  first  identified  with  revealed  truth  itself,  and 
then  having  to  be  explained  away  or  dropped. 

At  the  same  time  his  deprecation  of  premature 
dogmatism  in  theology  was  allied  not  with  any 
tendency  to  disparage  theological  science,  but  rather 
with  a  desire  to  make  it  living,  deep  and  candid — to 
purge  it  of  rigid  bigotry,  and  to  make  its  avowed 
principles  approach  as  nearly  as  might  be  to  the 
"  wisdom  of  the  perfect."  He  never  limited  the 
loyalty  due  from  a  Catholic  in  respect  of  theological 
literature  to  the  acceptance  of  defined  dogma.  He 
never  forgot  that  in  matters  of  the  highest  import  the 
great  Fathers  and  schoolmen  had  left  with  us  a  legacy 
of  thought  which  must  always  be  preserved.  Their 
writings  embodied  the  wisdom  of  the  Church,  and 
gave  the  line  of  lawful  development  in  revealed 
dogma,  though  in  culture  and  in  the  treatment  of 
secular  knowledge  those  writings  may  smack  of  the 
soil  on  which  they  were  born,  of  the  times  and  places 
of  their  elaboration,  of  the  prescientific  period. 
"  Catholic  inquiry  has  taken  certain  definite  shapes," 
he  wrote,  "  and  has  thrown  itself  into  the  form  of  a 
science,  with  a  method  and  phraseology  of  its  own, 
under  the  intellectual  handling  of  great  minds,  such  as 
St.  Athanasius,  St.  Augustine,  and  St.  Thomas ;  and 
I  feel  no  temptation  at  all  to  break  to  pieces  the  great 
legacy  of  thought  thus  committed  to  us  for  these 
latter  days." 

The  outcome  of  all  this  was  necessarily  a  resistance 
to   premature   dogmatism    both    in    science   and    in 

2  c 


386  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

theology.  A  similar  discipline  must  cure  both  defects. 
And  that  discipline,  as  he  urged  in  an  early  sermon, 
involves  the  patient  trustfulness  which  marks  alike  the 
true  man  of  science  and  the  typical  Christian. 

"  It  is,"  he  wrote,  "by  a  tedious  discipline  that  the 
mind  is  taught  to  overcome  those  baser  principles 
which  impede  it  in  philosophical  investigation  and  to 
moderate  those  nobler  faculties  and  feelings  which  are 
prejudicial  when  in  excess.  To  be  dispassionate  and 
cautious,  to  be  fair  in  discussion,  to  give  to  each 
phenomenon  which  nature  successively  presents  its 
true  weight,  candidly  to  admit  those  which  tell  against 
our  own  theory,  to  be  willing  to  be  quiet  for  a  time, 
to  submit  to  difficulties,  and  patiently  and  meekly 
proceed,  waiting  for  further  light,  is  a  temper  .  .  . 
little  known  to  the  heathen  world;  yet  it  is  the  only 
temper  in  which  we  can  hope  to  become  interpreters 
of  nature,  and  it  is  the  very  temper  which  Christianity 
sets  forth  as  the  perfection  of  our  moral  character."1 

The  following  pregnant  passages  from  occasional 
lectures  at  Dublin  2  illustrate  the  foregoing  summary 
of  Newman's  views.  Speaking  of  the  attitude  of  a 
thoughtful  Catholic  towards  the  bewildering  multi- 
plicity of  speculations  and  hypotheses  which  arise  in 
the  course  of  modern  research,  he  writes : 

He  is  sure,  and  nothing  shall  make  him  doubt,  that,  if 
anything  seems  to  be  proved  by  astronomer,  or  geologist,  or 
chronologist,  or  antiquarian,  or  ethnologist,  in  contradiction 
to  the  dogmas  of  faith,  that  point  will  eventually  turn  out, 
first,  not  to  be  proved,  or,  secondly,  not  contradictory,  or 
thirdly,  not  contradictory  to  anything  really  revealed,  but  to 
something  which  has  been  confused  with  revelation. 

1  University  Sermons,  p.  10. 

*  Idea  of  a  University,  pp.  428,  456. 


NEWMAN  ON  CONSTRUCTIVE  RELIGIOUS  THOUGHT   387 

The  Catholic  savant  and  thinker  is  the  highest 
product  of  the  Catholic  university  which  "  is  defer- 
ential and  loyal,  according  to  their  respective  weight, 
to  the  claims  of  literature,  of  physical  research,  of 
history,  of  metaphysics,  of  theological  science.  .  .  ." 

If  he  has  one  cardinal  maxim  in  his  philosophy,  it  is,  that 
truth  cannot  be  contrary  to  truth  ;  if  he  has  a  second,  it  is, 
that  truth  often  seems  contrary  to  truth  ;  and  if  a  third,  it  is 
the  practical  conclusion,  that  we  must  be  patient  with  such 
appearances,  and  not  be  hasty  to  pronounce  them  to  be  really 
of  a  more  formidable  character.  ...  It  is  the  highest  wisdom 
to  accept  truth  of  whatever  kind,  wherever  it  is  clearly  ascer- 
tained to  be  such,  though  there  be  difficulty  in  adjusting  it 
with  other  known  truth. 

In  view  of  these  general  principles,  while  the 
scientific  historian  or  physicist  must  beware  of 
advancing  conclusions  in  theology — a  matter  which 
he  must  leave  to  the  theologians — or  propounding 
*'  religious  paradoxes  "  or  "recklessly  scandalizing  the 
weak,"  he  may  claim  freedom  to  pursue  his  investiga- 
tions thoroughly  and  according  to  their  own  laws, 
without  interference  on  the  part  of  the  theologians. 
Such  freedom  is  the  only  path  to  further  knowledge. 

A  scientific  speculator  or  inquirer  is  not  bound,  in  con- 
ducting his  researches,  to  be  every  moment  adjusting  his 
course  by  the  maxims  of  the  schools  or  by  popular  traditions, 
or  by  those  of  any  other  science  distinct  from  his  own,  or  to 
be  ever  narrowly  watching  what  those  external  sciences  have 
to  say  to  him,  or  to  be  determined  to  be  edifying,  or  to  be 
ever  answering  heretics  and  unbelievers ;  being  confident, 
from  the  impulse  of  a  generous  faith,  that,  however  his  line  of 
investigation  may  swerve  now  and  then,  and  vary  to  and  fro 
in  its  course,  or  threaten  momentary  collision  or  embarrass- 
ment with  any  other  department  of  knowledge,  theological  or 
not ;   yet,  if  he  lets  it  alone,  it  will  be  sure  to  come  home, 


388  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

because  truth  never  can  be  really  contrary  to  truth.  .  .  . 
This  is  a  point  of  serious  importance  to  him.  Unless  he  is 
at  liberty  to  investigate  on  the  basis,  and  according  to  the 
peculiarities,  of  his  science,  he  cannot  investigate  at  all.  It 
is  the  very  law  of  the  human  mind  in  its  inquiry  after  and 
acquisition  of  truth  to  make  its  advances  by  a  process 
which  consists  of  many  stages,  and  is  circuitous.  .  .  . 

In  scientific  researches  error  may  be  said,  without  a  para- 
dox, to  be  in  some  instances  the  way  to  truth,  and  the  only 
way.  .  .  .  This  being  the  case,  we  are  obliged,  under  circum- 
stances, to  bear  for  a  while  with  what  we  feel  to  be  error,  in 
consideration  of  the  truth  in  which  it  is  eventually  to  issue. 
.  .  .  We  can  indeed,  if  we  will,  refuse  to  allow  of  investigation 
or  research  altogether,  but,  if  we  invite  reason  to  take  its 
place  in  our  schools,  we  must  let  reason  have  fair  and  full 
play.  If  we  reason,  we  must  submit  to  the  conditions  of 
reason.  We  cannot  use  it  by  halves  ;  we  must  use  it  as  pro- 
ceeding from  Him  who  has  also  given  us  Revelation  ;  and  to 
be  ever  interrupting  its  processes,  and  diverting  its  attention 
by  objections  brought  from  a  higher  knowledge,  is  parallel  to 
a  landsman's  dismay  at  the  changes  in  the  course  of  a  vessel 
on  which  he  has  deliberately  embarked,  and  argues  surely 
some  distrust  either  in  the  powers  of  Reason  on  the  one  hand, 
or  the  certainty  of  Revealed  Truth  on  the  other.  .  .  .  Let  us 
eschew  secular  history  and  science  and  philosophy  for  good 
and  all,  if  we  are  not  allowed  to  be  sure  that  Revelation  is  so 
true  that  the  altercations  and  perplexities  of  human  opinion 
cannot  really  or  eventually  injure  its  authority.  That  is  no 
intellectual  triumph  of  any  truth  of  Religion,  which  has 
not  been  preceded  by  a  full  statement  of  what  can  be  said 
against  it ;  it  is  but  the  ego  vapulando,  Me  verberando,  of  the 
Comedy.  .  .  . 

Great  minds  need  elbow-room,  not  indeed  in  the  domain 
of  faith,  but  of  thought.  And  so  indeed  do  lesser  minds,  and 
all  minds.  There  are  many  persons  in  the  world  who  are 
called,  and  with  a  great  deal  of  truth,  geniuses.  They  have 
been  gifted  by  nature  with  some  particular  faculty  or  capa- 
city ;  and,  while  vehemently  excited  and  imperiously  ruled 
by  it,  they  are  blind  to  everything  else.   They  are  enthusiasts 


NEWMAN  ON  CONSTRUCTIVE  RELIGIOUS  THOUGHT  389 

in  their  own  line,  and  are  simply  dead  to  the  beauty  of  any 
line  except  their  own.  Accordingly,  they  think  their  own  line 
the  only  line  in  the  world  worth  pursuing,  and  they  feel  a 
sort  of  contempt  for  such  studies  as  move  upon  any  other 
line.  Now  these  men  may  be,  and  often  are,  very  good 
Catholics,  and  have  not  a  dream  of  anything  but  affection  and 
deference  towards  Catholicity,  nay,  perhaps  are  zealous  in 
its  interests.  Yet,  if  you  insist  that  in  their  speculations, 
researches  or  conclusions  in  their  particular  science,  it  is  not 
enough  that  they  should  submit  to  the  Church  generally,  and 
acknowledge  its  dogmas,  but  that  they  must  get  up  all  that 
divines  have  said  or  the  multitude  believed  upon  religious 
matters,  you  simply  crush  and  stamp  out  the  flame  within 
them,  and  they  can  do  nothing  at  all.  .  .  .  What  I  would 
urge  upon  every  one,  whatever  may  be  his  particular  line  of 
research,  what  I  would  urge  upon  men  of  science  in  their 
thoughts  of  theology,  what  I  would  venture  to  recommend  to 
theologians,  when  their  attention  is  drawn  to  the  subject  of 
scientific  investigations,  is  a  great  and  firm  belief  in  the 
sovereignty  of  truth.  Error  may  flourish  for  a  time,  but  truth 
will  prevail  in  the  end.  The  only  effect  of  error  ultimately  is 
to  promote  truth.  Theories,  speculations,  hypotheses  are 
started  ;  perhaps  they  are  to  die,  still  not  before  they  have 
suggested  ideas  better  than  themselves.  These  better  ideas 
are  taken  up  in  turn  by  other  men,  and  if  they  do  not  yet 
lead  to  truth,  nevertheless  they  lead  to  what  is  still  nearer  to 
truth  than  themselves  ;  and  thus  knowledge  on  the  whole 
makes  progress.  The  errors  of  some  minds  in  scientific  inves- 
tigation are  more  fruitful  than  the  truths  of  others.  A  science 
seems  making  no  progress,  but  to  abound  in  failures,  yet 
imperceptibly  all  the  time  is  advancing. 

The  intellectual  and  moral  temper  of  the  ideal 
Christian  savant  and  thinker,  absolutely  candid, 
jealous  of  the  interests  both  of  scientific  and  of  reli- 
gious truth,  patient  of  temporary  perplexities  and 
apparent  contradictions,  disciplined  to  discriminate 
hypotheses    from    established   conclusions,    conscious 


39°  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

that  each  stage  of  intellectual  inquiry  is  but  a  step  on 
the  road  towards  ultimate  truth,  seems  by  Newman 
to  have  been  regarded  as  some  participation  in  the 
donum  sapienticz  granted  to  the  Church  as  a  whole 
and  in  the  long  run,  and  to  be  aimed  at  by  all  who 
would  strive  to  reach  such  intellectual  truth  as  is 
attainable  in  our  present  condition. 

Here  for  the  present  I  close  my  citations.  I  have 
quoted  enough  to  show  that  Newman's  ideal  for 
thorough  and  constructive  Christian  thought  in  the 
future  has  a  close  coincidence  with  his  generalizations 
from  the  story  of  the  Church  in  the  past.  Thought  at 
once  active  and  creative  is  necessary  now  as  in  the 
days  of  the  Fathers  and  the  schoolmen.  But  it  can 
only  be  guarded  from  the  rationalism  which  marks  the 
heretical  spirit  if  thinking  minds  are  disciplined  by 
those  influences  which  the  Church  is  specially  calcu- 
lated to  supply,  as  the  representative  of  the  unseen 
world,  and  the  guardian  at  once  of  Christian  tradition 
and  of  the  original  revelation.  Creative  thought  in 
such  conditions  is  the  handmaid  to  theology ;  other- 
wise it  makes  for  destruction  and  rationalism. 

The  above  observations  were  written,  for  the  most 
part,  before  the  word  "  Modernism  "  was  known.  In 
these  latter  days,  as  in  earlier  ones,  there  have  been 
"creative"  thinkers  who  deserved  our  censure,  and 
those  who  deserved  our  thanks.  The  Institut  de  St. 
Thomas  at  Louvain  attempts  "  constructive  thought " 
for  the  twentieth  century  as  St.  Thomas  himself 
attempted  it  for  the  thirteenth — with  loyalty  alike  to 
dogma,  to  tradition,  and  to  the  secular  sciences.  Its 
eminent  founder  once  expressed  the  wish  that  theo- 
logians should  also  be  men  of  science,  for  thus  only 
can  there  be  such  effective  knowledge  of  old  and  new 


NEWMAN  ON  CONSTRUCTIVE  RELIGIOUS  THOUGHT  391 

alike  as  may  combine  to  form  a  synthesis,  modern, 
but  not  modernist.  On  the  other  hand,  the  extreme 
utterances  which  provoked  the  Encyclical  Pascendi 
would  seem  to  evince  just  that  excessively  speculative 
habit,  and  that  disregard  of  tradition  and  authority 
which  have  in  every  age  led  heretics  beyond  bounds. 
Here  we  have,  then,  in  our  own  time,  both  the  use 
and  the  abuse  of  creative  thought  in  religion. 


XIII 

REDUCED    CHRISTIANITY  :    ITS 
ADVOCATES  AND   ITS   CRITICS 

In  speaking  of  Mr.  G.  K.  Chesterton's  book  on 
Orthodoxy,  I  hailed  some  of  its  arguments  as  an 
antidote  to  the  "staleness"  which  infects  even  the 
greatest  thoughts  and  beliefs  after  they  have  lasted 
many  centuries.  When  Christianity  came  upon  the 
world  in  all  the  freshness  of  novelty,  its  genius  and 
wisdom  at  once  stamped  it  in  the  eyes  of  many  as 
divine  and  paved  the  way  for  its  ultimate  triumph. 
By  Justin  Martyr  and  other  early  apologists  its  ethics 
were  depicted  as  the  realization  of  the  highest  ideals 
of  life  imperfectly  conceived  by  the  philosophers. 
But  the  religion  was  something  more  also.  It  was 
the  Gospel — the  "good  news"  that  God  had  visited 
his  people — and  gave  a  new  sense  of  the  value  of  life 
to  a  jaded  generation.  The  Gospel  is  now  no  longer 
"news."  And  those  who  have  ceased  to  realize  how 
much  which  they  value  in  contemporary  civilization  is 
really  dependent  on  it  have  begun  to  question  whether 
it  is  even  M  good."  One  supreme  advantage  possessed 
by  Mr.  Chesterton  as  an  apologist  was  that  he  himself 
had  at  one  time  been  an  agnostic,  and  an  agnostic 
with  singularly  little  acquaintance  with  the  teaching  of 
Christianity.      The   Gospel   came   as   good   news   to 


REDUCED   CHRISTIANITY  393 

himself,  as  it  did  to  the  pagan  world.  He  was  thus 
able  in  recording  his  own  personal  experience  to  impart 
to  thoughts  and  ideas  which  are  familiar  to  most  of  us 
just  that  effect  of  novelty  and  freshness  which  made 
them  so  powerful  in  the  early  centuries. 

Mr.  Chesterton's  great  merit  in  carrying  out  this 
work  is  his  keen  imagination  and  his  power  of  ex- 
hibiting principles  in  clear  outline  by  vivid  illustration. 
These  gifts  enable  him  to  make  others  realize  what  he 
has  felt.  To  many  thinkers  of  the  present  generation 
a  somewhat  lethargic  apprehension  of  Christianity  is 
the  starting-point.  They  are,  therefore,  open  to  the 
cheap  platitudes  of  that  class  of  critic  which  is  by 
nature  "agin  the  Government."  And,  in  Newman's 
phrase,  they  "reject  Christianity  before  they  have 
understood  it."  Doctrines  which,  whatever  difficulties 
they  present,  a  little  thought  shows  to  be  based  on 
the  nature  of  things,  are  discredited  in  their  eyes 
by  the  most  superficial  criticisms.  The  obvious 
objections  to  such  a  dogma  as  that  of  vicarious 
sacrifice  "  how  unfair  and  how  impossible  that  another 
should  bear  the  burden  of  my  sins "  ;  to  the  dogma 
of  original  sin  "how  unthinkable  that  I  should  suffer 
and  be  in  some  sense  infected  with  guilt  which  is  not 
due  to  my  own  personal  fault  "  ; — such  objections  we 
see  frequently  set  forth,  with  some  pomposity,  by 
the  representative  of  modern  enlightenment  as  con- 
siderations which  must  make  a  highly  trained  mind 
reject  this  religion  of  ruder  ages.  The  modern  critic 
is  kind  but  firm,  and  he  has  half  pitying  smiles  for 
the  uneducated  minds  which  fail  to  perceive  that 
such  flaws  in  the  system  are  fatal.  Mr.  Chesterton's 
manner  of  approach  is  the  opposite  one.  He  begins 
not    with    so-called    "flaws,"    but   with    the    strong 


394  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

points  of  the  system,  which  are  in  so  many  quarters 
not  realized  or  simply  overlooked.  He  shows  how 
Christianity  is  concerned  not  with  the  philosopher's 
ideal  world,  but  the  actual  world  in  which  we  live. 
The  pompous  critics  have  simply  not  faced  the 
puzzling  facts  of  life  which  make  Christianity  so 
helpful.  What  they  prove  to  be  unthinkable  is  not 
Christianity,  but  our  own  experience  of  life. 

1  cited  in  my  former  essay  instances  of  Mr. 
Chesterton's  method,  and  it  may  be  used  in  answering 
the  very  arguments  just  mentioned.  That  our  nature 
is  prone  to  evil  apart  even  from  the  results  of  our 
own  personal  wrong-doing  is  not  a  mere  theory  of 
Christianity  but  a  fact  of  experience,  and  to  many  in 
its  degree  an  almost  crushing  one.  Christianity  faces 
the  fact :  it  does  not  invent  it.  If  you  preach  the 
doctrines  of  original  sin  and  of  the  Atonement  you  at 
least  help  people  to  encounter  it.-  To  find  the  cause 
of  a  disease  and  its  remedy,  even  though  neither 
cause  nor  remedy  accord  with  our  own  preconceived 
view  of  things,  is  preferable  to  the  fool's  paradise 
which  simply  denies  that  we  are  ill  because  we  cannot 
understand  the  illness.  We  do  not  profess  in  our 
small  corner  of  the  universe  fully  to  understand  the 
justice  of  man's  lot  as  it  is  understood  by  Him  who 
knows  the  whole.  But  the  doctrines  in  question 
recognize  obvious  and  trying  facts.  They  help  us  to 
encounter  such  facts  by  a  view  which  is  coherent  even 
though  it  be  imperfect.  This  view  is  that  mankind 
has  something  of  the  character  of  an  organism,  and 
the  moral  health  of  the  individual  is  bound  up  with 
that  of  the  whole.  Christianity  tells  us  that  we  are 
prone  to  evil  because  mankind  has  fallen  from  its 
pristine  and  normal  state.     Trouble  for  many  arose 


REDUCED  CHRISTIANITY  395 

from  the  sin  of  one  man,  and  One  Man  cancels  its 
effects  and  will  save  us  if  we  trust  in  Him.  A  task 
which  seems  hopeless  to  the  individual  is  not  really- 
hopeless  :  for  what  he  cannot  do  of  himself  the  God- 
man  will  help  him  to  do,  supplying  the  defects  which 
even  at  best  will  remain  in  his  attempt  to  get  rid  of 
a  burden  which  is  too  heavy  for  him.  The  crushing 
effect  of  the  undeniable  facts  of  a  mysterious  world  is 
removed  by  doctrines  which  are  no  doubt  themselves 
mysterious.  The  objections  to  the  doctrines  are 
equally  objections  to  the  facts  of  experience,  while 
the  doctrines  recognize  the  facts  and  make  them  more 
and  not  less  bearable  and  intelligible. 

If  there  is  no  such  thing  as  human  sinfulness  of 
course  the  superior  persons  are  right,  and  the  Atone- 
ment and  original  sin  are  a  very  fanciful  and  im- 
probable account  of  things. 

I  propose  to  consider  further  this  line  of  thought 
in  relation  to  two  other  works  representing  both  of 
them  schools  of  religious  thought  materially  different 
from  Mr.  Chesterton's.  Dr.  Neville  Figgis's  lectures 
on  The  Gospel  and  Human  Needs  is  apparently  the 
outcome,  not  of  such  a  reaction  as  Mr.  Chesterton's 
against  agnosticism,  but  of  a  new  realization  of  the 
depth  of  the  Christian  message  on  the  part  of  one  who 
has  never  rejected  it ;  and  the  bowdlerized  Christianity 
of  the  superior  person  has  been  graphically  painted  in 
Mrs.  Humphry  Ward's  Case  of  Richard  Meynell.  To 
consider  one  of  these  books  helps  us  to  consider  the 
other,  for  it  is  the  growing  prevalence  of  the  "  reduced 
Christianity  "  of  Mrs.  Ward  which  gives  occasion  for 
Mr.  Figgis's  argument.  There  is  a  considerable  resem- 
blance between  Mr.  Figgis's  thought  and  Mr.  Chester- 
ton's, but  Mr.  Figgis  faces  much  more  explicitly  than 


396  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

Mr.  Chesterton  the  questions  raised  by  modern  historical 
and  biblical  criticism  which  have  had  so  large  a  share 
in  arousing  the  intellectualist  revolt  against  traditional 
Christianity.  Mr.  Figgis  faces  as  frankly  as  Mrs. 
Ward  the  fact  of  modern  criticism  and  the  necessity 
of  accepting  its  assured  results.  But  his  mental 
attitude  on  the  subject  is  far  more  discriminating  and 
far  more  philosophical  than  that  of  Mrs.  Ward's  hero, 
Richard  Meynell. 

To  speak  of  these  books  means  to  speak  of  the 
philosophy  of  religious  belief — a  delicate  and  to  many 
an  irritating  subject.  What  faith  in  Christianity  is 
possible  to  a  thoughtful  mind  ?  This  question  often 
irritates  believers  and  unbelievers  alike.  The  believer, 
Protestant  or  Catholic,  whose  mind  moves  in  a  fixed 
groove,  hates  all  talk  about  reasons  for  doubt. 
"  Christianity  is  there — let  people  take  it  or  leave  it," 
he  is  inclined  to  say.  "  Its  proofs  suffice  for  men  of 
good  will.  If  many  reject  them  it  is  due  to  their  own 
perversity."  The  aggressive  unbeliever  of  the  conti- 
nental type,  on  the  other  hand,  exceedingly  dislikes  the 
return  into  the  field  of  debate  of  the  superstitions  that 
have  so  long  misdirected  the  energies  of  humanity  and 
diverted  the  attention  of  the  ablest  citizens  from  the 
great  field  for  work  open  to  them  in  this  world.  He 
and  his  friends  have  been  doing  their  best  to  sweep 
away  the  traces  of  this  medieval  incubus.  The  Via  di 
San  Marco  has  become  the  Via  ciella  Libertii  in  his  own 
city.  The  old  monasteries  are  turned  into  barracks 
for  soldiers.  The  former  domination  of  the  priests  in 
the  State  is  gone,  and  even  in  the  schools  it  is  fast 
going.  Now  suddenly  a  cloud  is  raised  :  the  question 
is  asked,  "  Is  all  of  this  really  and  for  certain  a 
movement  of  progress  ?     Is  not  the  assumption  that 


REDUCED   CHRISTIANITY  397 

Christianity  is  antiquated  and  doomed  premature  ?  " 
The  ordinary  man  of  the  world  in  England  dislikes 
the  subject  almost  equally.  "  For  Heaven's  sake,"  he 
is  inclined  to  say,  "  do  leave  alone  in  your  published 
writings  what  is  a  purely  personal  question  of  no 
public  importance."  He  dislikes  the  note  of  urgency 
and  what  he  regards  as  morbidity  on  the  subject  even 
more  than  the  subject  itself.  He  is  quite  content  to 
see  all  religions  freely  exercised  in  the  national  life, 
but  detests  treating  such  controversies  as  matters  of 
public  importance. 

Yet  just  as  with  believers,  in  an  age  of  faith,  whose 
religion  has  long  ceased  to  be  practical,  circumstances 
may  suddenly  arise  which  make  it  most  actual  to  them, 
so  in  an  age  of  science  the  problem  of  religious  belief, 
habitually  regarded  as  tiresome  and  merely  speculative, 
may  suddenly  become  for  any  one  a  most  urgent  and 
real  matter. 

No  one  can  say  what  will  bring  the  change  of 
attitude.  Misfortunes  may  leave  us  unchanged  in  this 
respect.  Or  they  may  suddenly  and  completely  change 
us.  So  with  the  consequences  of  sin.  Such  things 
may  leave  us  as  we  were,  or  they  may  give  occasion  for 
such  lines  as  Tennyson's  : 

Through  sin  and  sorrow  into  Thee  we  pass 
By  that  same  path  our  true  forefathers  trod. 

So  with  the  advance  of  life  and  the  nearer  prospect  of 
that  future  which,  if  Christianity  perchance  be  true,  so 
profoundly  concerns  our  destiny.  It  may  deepen  us. 
It  may  fail  to  do  so.  The  loss  of  some  one  we  love 
will  not  necessarily  make  the  change.  But  it  often 
does  bring  an  overpowering  realization  of  the  ques- 
tion, Where  is  he — shall  we  meet  again  ?     As   with 


398  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

conversion  to  God  and  the  new  sense  it  brings  of  the 
reality  of  what  we  had  always  professed  to  believe,  so 
with  the  new  urgency  of  the  question,  "  What  are  we 
justified  in  believing?"  In  some  persons  the  two 
things  are  almost  the  same.  With  John  Bunyan  the 
process  of  conversion  was  for  a  time  largely  one  with 
the  struggle  against  speculative  doubt.  Lacordaire 
when  he  became  serious  and  earnest  found  that 
reasons  for  belief  which  he  had  always  known  affected 
him  in  a  new  way.  The  turning  to  God  and  the 
returning  to  belief  were  one  and  the  same  act. 
Huysmans  has  said  much  the  same  thing  in  his 
account  of  Durtal's  conversion.  That  wonderful 
change  in  Pascal,  of  which  his  own  description  can 
never  be  read  too  often,  surely  meant,  in  one  or  his 
sceptical  temperament,  at  least  quite  a  new  firmness 
and  vividness  of  belief  as  well  as  a  deepening  of  the 
religious  life. 

I  have  purposely  prefixed  these  observations  to 
those  that  are  to  follow  on  the  two  books  I  have  named 
because  I  am  convinced  that  the  sufficiency  and  value 
of  the  proposals  discussed  by  each  of  the  writers  can 
only  be  truly  weighed  if  the  reader  realizes,  at  all 
events  in  imagination,  the  conditions  of  life  in  which 
religion  assumes  real  importance.  Those  will  judge 
best  in  whom  these  conditions  are  actually  present. 
We  shall  judge  most  justly  when  to  our  average 
neighbour  we  appear  morbid,  as  a  man  who  sees 
the  danger  signal  will  have  a  look  of  alarm  which 
appears  morbid  to  one  whose  face  is  turned  the  other 
way.  We  want  to  know  not  what  aspects  of  Christian 
tradition  will  be  interesting,  suggestive,  stimulating, 
worth  setting  down  in  an  essay,  but  what  will  stand 
the  test  of  the  hard  facts  of  life  and  actually  help 


REDUCED  CHRISTIANITY  399 

those  who  sorely  need  help.  The  discussion  is  not 
of  vital  importance  while  religion  is  regarded  as  a 
walking-stick  to  flourish  in  the  hand.  The  important 
question  is,  How  will  it  do  as  a  crutch  to  lean  on 
in  the  ugly  circumstances  of  a  maimed  life  in  which 
you  cannot  walk?  This  is  why  brand-new  theories 
are  apt  to  make  one  impatient  at  a  time  of  need,  and 
the  experience  of  ages  as  to  what  has  actually  helped 
suffering  humanity  to  endure  and  to  hope  in  evil  days 
has  an  urgent  claim  to  consideration  in  such  discussion 
as  is  possible.  An  old  religion  carries  the  dignity  and 
weight  which  an  old  hero  of  many  campaigns  carries 
in  a  discussion  on  tactics.  I  say  "  such  discussion  as 
is  possible,"  because  words  can  be  no  more  than  sign- 
posts pointing  to  states  of  mind  which  we  can  only 
recognize  adequately  each  in  his  own  consciousness. 
The  prescriptions  of  our  rival  doctors  can  be  quite 
decisively  tested  only  by  those  who  make  trial  of 
them. 

If  Mr.  Figgis  lacks  something  of  Mr.  Chesterton's 
extraordinary  vividness  in  style  he  comes  (as  I  have 
said)  to  much  closer  quarters  with  the  modern  literature 
of  his  subject  and  suggests  a  more  practical  programme 
in  view  of  the  most  urgent  and  best  established 
conclusions  of  the  critics.  There  are  many  minds 
which  incline  to  the  dilemma — you  must  either  be 
suspicious  of  the  whole  method  of  modern  biblical 
criticism  and  the  serious  critical  thought  of  the  day  on 
religious  problems,  or,  if  you  allow  it  to  have  its  due 
weight,  you  must  be  content  with  a  Christianity  so 
much  reduced  as  to  be  revolutionized.  Miracle  must 
be  eliminated,  and  the  Christ  of  history  will  almost 
disappear.  M  Reduced  Christianity  "  has  become  an 
accepted  phrase.     By  its  advocates  Christian  theology 


400  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

is  held  to  be  defeated.  If  dogmatic  formulae  are  kept 
at  all  it  is  as  venerable  but  empty  symbols  which,  for 
sentimental  reasons,  one  would  not  rudely  or  abruptly 
destroy.  Some,  perhaps,  they  would  permanently 
keep,  for  the  same  reason  that  M.  Combes  was 
willing  to  keep  the  old  French  cathedrals — as  monu- 
ments of  the  past — harmless  so  long  as  they  no 
longer  harbour  still  living  superstitions.  Nay,  more, 
they  may  be  valuable  as  symbols,  apart  from  their 
original  significance.  You  still  have  (such  thinkers 
contend)  the  inspiring  manifestation  of  the  divine  in 
the  idea  of  Christ  as  developed  by  His  disciples  quite 
apart  from  its  historical  truth.  You  can  still  endeavour 
to  live  a  Christlike  life,  all  the  more  happily  because 
you  have  cleared  the  ground  of  superstitions  and 
fables  to  which  no  thinking  man  can  assent  in  his 
heart,  and  which  clouded  the  best  minds  with  secret 
suspicion  of  the  whole  system. 

The  above  dilemma  is  throughout  assumed  by 
Richard  Meynell  to  exhaust  the  alternatives,  and  any 
prima  facie  force  his  views  may  have  depends  on  its 
being  true  that  no  more  dogmatic  belief  than  what 
has  just  been  outlined  is  possible  to  one  who  faces  the 
result  of  modern  criticism.  Meynell  is  persuasive  when 
he  speaks  as  follows  : 

The  hypothesis  of  faith  is  weighted  with  a  vast  mass  of 
stubborn  matter  that  it  was  never  meant  to  carry — bad  his- 
tory— bad  criticism — an  outgrown  philosophy.  To  make  it 
carry  [this  matter] — in  our  belief — you  have  to  fly  in  the  face 
of  that  gradual  education  of  the  world,  education  of  the  mind, 
education  of  the  conscience,  which  is  the  chief  mark  of  God 
in  the  world.  But  the  hypothesis  of  Faith  in  itself  remains — 
take  it  at  its  lowest — as  rational,  as  defensible  as  any  other. 

All  this  may  have  a  perfectly  true  sense — a  sense 


REDUCED   CHRISTIANITY  401 

in  which  it  could  be  said  with  entire  conviction  by 
Mr.  Figgis  or  by  Cardinal  Newman  himself.  Dolus 
latet  in  generalibus.  It  is  not  that  bad  history,  bad 
criticism,  or  an  outgrown  philosophy  is  advocated  by 
Mr.  Figgis  as  necessary  to  Christianity  and  rejected 
by  Richard  Meynell.  It  is  that  when  we  come  to  ask 
what  is  meant  by  the  "hypothesis  of  faith  "  and  what 
by  outgrown  philosophy  and  bad  criticism  they  differ 
toto  coelo.  Mr.  Figgis,  following  here  in  the  Cardinal's 
footsteps,  suggests  a  third  alternative  which  Meynell 

ores. 

Mr.  Figgis  opposes  what  I  must  call  the  credulity 
of  Mrs.  Ward — her  wholesale  and  uncritical  reaction 
from  credulity  in  old  legends  to  credulity  in  brand-new 
theories.  A  sifting  process  and  time  for  sifting  are 
necessary  in  respect  of  both  alike.  Richard  Meynell, 
on  the  contrary,  is  ready  to  drop  at  once  not  merely 
legendary  accretions  which  are  clearly  discredited,  but 
the  whole  essence  of  the  creed,  in  the  panic  raised  by 
aggressive  criticism.  Mr.  Figgis  insists  that  this  panic 
is  irrational — that  criticism  and  philosophy,  apart  from 
the  naturalistic  presuppositions  which  have  led  many 
able  critics  to  their  anti-Christian  conclusions,  have  no 
such  far  reaching  destructive  effect.  On  the  other 
side  he  holds  that  if  the  principles  which  "  reduced 
Christianity  "  really  admits  are  fully  realized,  they  lead 
simply  to  Pantheism,  or  even  naturalism.  What  is 
apparently  added  to  this  by  the  neo-Christian  dissolves 
on  close  examination,  part  proving  to  be  mere  words 
and  part  to  be  untenable  or  unworkable.  He  points 
out,  with  Mr.  Chesterton,  that  in  their  wholesale  panic 
men  are  surrendering  not  by  any  means  only  what  the 
advance  of  sober  criticism  and  philosophy  demands, 
but  beliefs  in  which  traditional  Christianity  goes  far 

2   D 


402  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

deeper,  and  is  far  more  in  harmony  with  what  we 
know  of  this  strange  and  mysterious  world  than  the 
"  reduced  Christianity  "  which  promises  us  emancipa- 
tion. The  experienced  facts  of  life  and  the  wonders 
of  Christianity  are,  in  many  cases  as  I  have  said,  the 
problem  to  be  solved  and  its  solution.  Reduced 
Christianity  leaves  the  hardest  part  of  the  problem 
unsolved  and  then  proceeds  to  deny  its  very  existence. 
Many  conclusions,  which  are  advanced  as  the  result 
of  criticism  and  thought  brought  up  to  date,  are 
really  drawn  from  naturalistic  philosophical  principles 
assumed  and  inserted  by  the  critics  into  the  premises — 
a  process  of  conjuring.  Far  from  a  deeper  philosophy 
of  life  "  reduced  Christianity  "  offers  us  a  shallower 
one,  because  it  fails  in  the  first  essential  of  inductive 
reasoning,  a  frank  survey  of  the  facts  to  be  explained. 
In  a  word,  while  its  advocates  hope  timidly  that  a 
niche  may  be  found  for  a  remnant  of  Christianity  in 
the  great  temple  of  modern  thought  and  learning,  Mr. 
Figgis  holds  that  Christianity  may  well  keep  its  own 
temple  and  go  on  boldly  in  its  own  course,  and  can 
perfectly  assimilate  all  genuine  results  of  criticism 
without  essential  change  in  its  doctrines.  This  method 
reverses  that  of  the  modernist.  It  recognizes  at  the 
outset  the  value  of  the  Christian  revelation  tested  by 
long  experience,  and  treats  it  as  being  in  possession 
until  it  is  disproved.  The  corrections  made  by  the 
advance  of  science  in  the  human  traditions  which 
form  its  setting,  are  to  be  made  cautiously,  and  with 
care,  with  the  eye  of  a  philosopher  who  knows  how 
fashions  tend  to  run  to  excess  and  then  to  change. 
The  neo-Christian,  on  the  contrary,  starts  by  making 
the  existing  fashion  in  the  world  of  thought  and  science 
his  oracle — regardless    of    the   fact    that    experience 


REDUCED   CHRISTIANITY  403 

witnesses  to  nothing  more  certainly  than  the  constant 
changes  in  what  the  critics  advance  at  first  as  certain 
results.  He  starts  by  displacing  Christianity  from  her 
position  of  vantage,  as  hereditary  possessor  of  the 
land,  with  a  great  record  of  practical  success  as  a 
religion,  and  then  places  her  on  her  knees  as  an 
outsider  and  a  suppliant,  asking  only  to  reinstate  a 
few  unimportant,  unintrusive  survivals  of  her  former 
self  in  a  system  of  thought  and  belief  to  which  she 
is  on  the  whole  quite  alien.  It  is  surely  clear  that 
whatever  opinion  may  be  held  as  to  the  nature  of  the 
final  result,  it  should  be  reached  by  Mr.  Figgis's 
method  and  not  by  Mrs.  Ward's — by  conservative 
development  and  not  by  panic-stricken  revolution. 

Mr.  Figgis's  strength  lies  in  his  readiness  to  con- 
cede to  historical  criticism  all  that  is  necessary,  and 
his  firm  resistance  to  superfluous  concessions  and 
panic.  His  attitude  towards  doubt  is  particularly 
interesting.  He  is  clearly  not  one  of  those  who  have 
little  sympathy  with  the  doubter  or  his  difficulties. 
But,  nevertheless,  he  points  out  that  life  is  for  action, 
and  he  prescribes  for  the  doubter  a  moral  tonic.  Let 
the  doubter  be  up  and  doing.  Let  him  act  one  way 
or  the  other.  Let  him  have  the  courage  of  his  doubts 
and  realize  the  logical  consequences  of  unbelief.  This 
may  clear  his  path.  If  he  abandons  cloudy  phrases 
and  mere  reverie  and  assumes  that  practical  attitude 
which  befits  us  in  an  urgent  crisis,  he  is  likely  to  see 
and  feel  how  little  his  doubts  leave  him  to  rest  on 
in  the  conduct  of  life.  He  must  either  acquiesce  in 
this  result  or  give  himself  another  chance  of  realizing 
fully  the  wisdom  of  the  Christianity  of  the  Gospels 
which  he  has  rejected,  only  perhaps  half  mastering  its 
philosophical    depth.     The    shock   thus   administered 


4<H  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

may  prove  just  what  is  wanted  to  knit  his  intellectual 
and  moral  frame  together,  and  give  him  the  insight 
necessary  for  belief. 

Mr.  Figgis's  plea  for  an  undiluted  Christianity  is 
advanced  under  four  heads  :  First,  he  pleads  for  a 
miraculous  revelation.  He  holds  that  it  has  been 
dismissed,  not  on  grounds  of  evidence,  but  in  con- 
sequence of  a  sub-conscious  naturalistic  philosophy 
which  is  widely  influential  and  yet  does  not  really 
accord  with  the  facts  of  experience.  The  enormous 
strides  made  in  our  day  by  natural  science  which  is 
based  on  uniformity  of  cause  and  effect  are  responsible 
for  this  naturalistic  tendency.  The  freedom  of  the 
human  will  is  an  obvious  exception  to  such  uniformity. 
Therefore  naturalism  does  not  square  with  the  facts  of 
life.  A  miraculous  revelation  is  at  least  in  harmony 
with  this  feature  of  our  experience.  But  so  much  are 
we  swayed  by  imagination  that  if  we  allow  sub- 
conscious naturalism  to  discredit  miracles,  we  are  in 
danger  of  losing  belief  in  freedom  itself  and  regarding 
ourselves  as  "cogs  in  the  great  machine"  of  Nature. 
A  miraculous  revelation  interposed  in  the  history  of 
the  human  race  by  the  freewill  of  God  proclaims  aloud 
that  the  spirit  is  free  amid  the  uniformity  of  material 
nature,  and  thus  gives  to  the  individual  heart  and 
imagination  to  realize  and  use  his  own  freedom. 

Secondly,  Mr.  Figgis  pleads  in  general  for  the 
recognition  of  mystery  in  religion  ;  and  here  he  gives 
us  the  plain  man's  common-sense  argument  which  goes 
far  nearer  to  the  heart  of  things  than  the  reasoning 
of  the  dilettante  philosopher  : 

The  plain  man's  readiness  to  accept  the  mysteries  of 
God's  grace  rests  at  once  on  his  ignorance  and  his  know- 
ledge.    He  feels  that  in  all  things  there  is  mystery,  and  that 


REDUCED   CHRISTIANITY  4°5 

what  is  the  constant  factor  of  his  inner  being  is  somehow 
part  of  the  stuff  of  the  universe.  He  places  no  reliance  at  all 
upon  the  optimistic  faith  of  men  who,  like  Du  Bois  Raymond, 
look  forward  to  the  day  when  the  world  can  be  reduced  to  a 
mathematical  formula  ;  or  in  the  more  common  assertion  that 
the  whole  of  being  is  penetrable  to  thought,  for  even  the 
delight  in  a  poem  or  a  piece  of  music  can  prove  the  contrary. 
He  knows  that,  though  men  may  explain  the  world,  he 
remains  inexplicable  to  himself.  On  the  other  hand,  he  feels 
that  there  must  be  reality  in  that  love  and  joy  and  willing 
resolve  which  are  the  deepest  and  most  real  things  in  his  life. 
The  Christian  faith  asserts  this  truth  at  once  of  the  mystery 
of  things,  of  the  eternity  of  love,  of  the  infinite  worth  of 
choice,  as  does  no  other  creed.     And  this  is  its  warrant. 

Thirdly,  Mr.  Figgis  urges — making  another  appeal 
to  the  needs  of  the  plain  man — that  the  actual  historical 
Christ  who  died  and  rose  again  from  the  dead  and  is 
believed  by  Christians  still  to  live  and  to  hear  and  to 
help  those  who  ask  for  help,  is  clearly  a  power  and 
succour  in  the  life  of  an  ordinary  man  which  an  imag- 
ined ideal  figure  can  never  be.  Moreover,  the  rejection 
of  the  old  belief  on  this  head  is  far  from  being  really 
due  to  exact  thought.  It  is  rather  due  to  a  panic 
and  to  prejudice.  Because  some  religious  traditions 
have  been  disproved  by  the  critics,  therefore  even  the 
unproved  theories  of  the  critics  are  to  be  allowed  to 
sweep  all  before  them.  Christianity  is  to  be  regarded 
as  falling  like  a  house  of  cards.  Again,  the  modern 
mind,  with  its  bias  against  the  miraculous,  does  not 
view  the  evidence  for  such  an  alleged  fact  as  the 
Resurrection  even  impartially.  It  approaches  such 
evidence  with  an  enormous  presumption  against  its 
sufficiency. 

But  we  have  the  contrast  between  reduced  Chris- 
tianity and  genuine  Christianity  most  vividly  in  Mr. 


406  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

Figgis's  last  contention — the  reality  of  sin  and  of 
forgiveness.  J.  A.  Froude  long  ago  saw  that  this  was 
the  turning-point  in  the  discussion.  And  Mr.  Figgis 
goes  over  much  of  the  ground  covered  sixty  years 
since  by  Markham  Sutherland's  reflections  in  Froude's 
Nemesis  of  Faith.  Of  all  the  doctrines  of  traditionary 
Christianity  sin  is  the  most  uncongenial  to  the  modern 
temper.  The  reality  of  sin  is  not  a  thing  which 
modern  biblical  criticism  can  disprove.  The  objection 
to  it  comes  from  a  philosophy  of  life  and  of  human 
nature  to  which  it  is  uncongenial.  Yet  surely — as  I 
have  already  said — this  is  a  philosophy  which  says  if 
facts  don't  square  with  it  tant  pis  pour  les  /aits.  It 
has  been  in  the  past  the  experience  and  urgency  of  sin 
which  more  than  anything  else  has  made  men  welcome 
the  good  news  of  the  gospel.  Sin  does  undoubtedly 
jar  most  unpleasantly  with  an  optimist  philosopher's 
theory  of  life.  Newman  once  described  the  ideal 
human  nature  present  to  the  Greek  mind — as  though 
that  nature  were  perfectly  balanced,  perfectly  healthy 
and  could  "  dance  through  life."  Nevertheless  history 
records  moral  excesses  which  were  fearfully  prevalent 
in  Greek  society.  Mr.  Figgis  quotes  Sir  Oliver  Lodge 
as  bidding  sensible  men  "  not  to  worry  about  their 
sins,  but  to  be  up  and  doing."  All  very  well  if  men 
are  so  happily  constituted  that  they  can  lead  an  ideal 
life  of  action  untroubled  by  their  lower  nature.  Such 
things  as  sin  and  the  evil  tendencies  of  nature  are 
unseemly  and  depressing  and  undignified,  and  the 
philosopher  looks  away  from  them.  They  are  too 
ugly  a  blot  in  any  scheme  of  life  for  his  complacency. 
The  advocate  of  "  reduced  Christianity  "  also  passes 
them  by  with  scarcely  a  glance.  Traditional  Chris- 
tianity, on  the  other  hand,  is  too  practical  to  ignore 


REDUCED   CHRISTIANITY  407 

them,  and  brings  from  another  world  the  mysterious 
explanations  which  enable  us  frankly  to  face  such 
mysteries  in  this. 

The  question  is  [writes  Mr.  Figgis],  Is  it  there,  this  sense 
of  sin  ?  not,  How  did  it  get  there  ?  Do  we  as  a  fact  experi- 
ence this  sense  of  guilt,  of  weakness,  of  a  diseased  will ;  and 
are  we  most  conscious  of  it  when  we  are  most  conscious  of 
the  call  to  the  higher  life  ?  And  to  answer  this,  each  of  us 
can  only  appeal  to  his  own  consciousness  ;  he  can  go  no  fur- 
ther. St.  Paul  had  to  go  to  himself  for  his  evidence  :  "  We 
know  that  the  law  is  spiritual,  but  I  am  carnal,  sold  under 
sin.  For  that  which  I  do,  I  would  not ;  what  I  would,  that 
do  I  not ;  but  what  I  hate  that  do  I.  ...  To  will  is  present 
with  me,  but  how  to  perform  that  which  is  good  I  find  not ; 
for  the  good  that  I  would  I  do  not,  but  the  evil  which  I 
would  not,  that  I  do.  .  .  .  Oh,  wretched  man  that  I  am,  who 
shall  deliver  me  from  the  body  of  this  death !  " 

Either  these  words  awaken  an  echo  in  our  hearts,  or 
they  do  not.  They  may  seem  to  represent  our  own  deep  and 
constant  experience ;  or  we  may  feel  ourselves  members  of 
that  fortunate  band  who  can  say  with  a  different  teacher, 
"  the  higher  man  of  to-day  is  not  worrying  about  his  sins  ;  he 
wants  to  be  up  and  doing." 

It  is  only  if  St.  Paul's  words  represent  the  facts  that  the 
Gospel  has  any  foothold  in  my  soul. 

For  myself  I  find  them  true,  and  the  other  not  true  to  my 
inner  life.  It  is  that  very  "worrying"  about  sin  which  I 
cannot  escape  that  obstructs  all  my  desires  to  be  up  and 
doing  and  blights  even  my  highest  and  purest  thoughts. 
Doubtless  I  might  be  happier,  could  I  feel  myself  a  man  of 
the  new  dogmatic,  not  "  essentially  a  sinner  "  !  But  I  cannot. 
I  cannot  help  it ;  I  have  this  burden,  like  Christian  in  the 
story,  and  I  cannot  roll  it  off  except  at  the  foot  of  the  Cross. 
Miserable  and  well-nigh  hopeless  in  face  of  the  future,  I  have 
to  live.  Taught  by  oft-recurring  failures  to  distrust  my  best 
resolves,  and  finding  sincerest  love  and  all  the  hardest  sacri- 
fices vain,  stained  with  the  past,  frightened  in  face  of  the 
tempter,  aware  how  easy  it  is  to  yield  and  what  little  rest  he 


408  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

gives,  tortured  with  lustful  passions,  a  prey  to  pride  and 
malice,  contemptible  even  more  than  odious  in  my  weakness, 
divided  in  my  inmost  being,  torn  every  hour  between  God 
and  the  devil,  to  whom  shall  I  go  ?  What  must  I  do  to  be 
saved  ?  Alas  !  I  know  that  I  can  do  nothing.  I  have  no 
quid  pro  quo  to  offer  God,  and  cannot  win  my  pardon  by  any 
virtue  or  gift ;  I  am  naked,  beaten,  prostrate. 

Nothing  in  my  hand  I  bring, 
Simply  to  Thy  Cross  I  cling  : 
Naked,  come  to  Thee  for  dress ; 
Helpless,  look  to  Thee  for  grace ; 
Foul,  I  to  the  fountain  fly  ; 
Wash  me,  Saviour,  or  I  die. 

Mr.  Figgis,  in  words  written  before  the  appearance 
of  Mrs.  Ward's  book,  depicts  the  position  of  Richard 
Meynell  and  his  friends  very  aptly. 

Finding  in  orthodox  Christianity  great  difficulties,  they 
purpose,  by  what  seem  to  them  changes  of  detail,  to  make  it 
once  more  acceptable  to  the  cultivated  intelligence.  Thus 
they  are  in  their  own  view  apologists.  They  look  for  a  great 
revival.  Once  more  will  the  Church  go  forth  conquering  and 
to  conquer,  purged  of  its  grosser  elements,  the  relics  of  pagan 
and  oriental  error ;  refined  to  the  modern  taste,  relieved  of  its 
ignorant  love  of  marvels,  its  feminine  submission  to  priests, 
and  its  really  rather  vulgar  preoccupation  with  sin  and  matters 
which  decent  people  do  not  think  about. 

Mr.  Figgis  remarks  most  pertinently  that  Christi- 
anity does  not  exist  only  for  the  benefit  of  decent 
people  and  of  the  cultivated  classes.  It  is  addressed 
primarily  to  the  poor  and  to  sinners.  Its  marvels 
were  recorded  by  its  Divine  Author,  "  The  blind  see, 
the  lame  walk,"  and  the  climax  of  these  records  is 
reached  in  the  fact  that  "  the  poor  have  the  Gospel 
preached  to  them."     Again,  our  Lord  tells  us  u  I  came 


REDUCED   CHRISTIANITY  409 

to  call  not  the  just  but  sinners."  And  it  is,  with  any 
of  us,  at  the  moment  when  we  are  hard  hit  and  have 
some  of  the  trials  of  the  poor  and  of  sinners  that  we 
most  need  it  and  can  best  understand  it. 

If  we  go  to  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward's  pages  we  find 
that  Meynell  retains  as  his  positive  religion  nothing  at 
all  in  the  shape  of  belief  which  can  inspire  moral  action 
in  the  many.  Most  of  what  Mr.  Figgis  would  retain 
as  the  "  hypothesis  of  faith  "  is  carted  away  by  Meynell 
as  discredited  by  bad  criticism  and  bad  philosophy. 
Mr.  Figgis's  presumption  is  (as  I  have  said)  that  the 
Christian  tradition  remains  in  possession  as  the  "  hypo- 
thesis of  faith,"  though  you  must  subtract  from  its 
setting  what  is  clearly  shown  to  be  the  outcome  of 
bad  criticism.  Mrs.  Ward's  presumption  is  that  all 
the  "  higher  criticism "  of  German  theologians  and 
most  of  the  speculations  of  anti-Christian  philosophers 
and  critics  are  true,  and  that  only  what  remains  to 
traditional  belief  after  what  they  dismiss  is  subtracted 
may  be  retained  as  "  the  hypothesis  of  faith  " ;  and 
this  is  mainly,  so  far  as  I  can  see,  an  enthusiasm  for 
moral  action — for  the  higher  life  of  the  spirit  in  its 
war  against  the  animal  life.  And  though  a  helpful 
impulse  is  to  be  derived  from  the  traditional  story 
of  Christianity  considered  apart  from  its  historical 
truth,  there  is  uncertainty  as  to  how  much  of  the 
life  of  the  spirit,  as  enforced  in  the  evangelical 
counsels,  is  to  be  allowed  to  stand  in  the  new  Christi- 
anity. Certainly  the  ideal  of  self-denying  charity 
towards  our  fellow-men  is  retained.  But  the  complete 
other-worldliness  of  the  Gospel  ethics  does  not  accord 
readily  with  Meynell's  language.  It  would  be  rash  to 
say  that  Richard  Meynell  accepts  the  unearthly 
teaching  of  the  eight  beatitudes,  though  he  certainly 


41  o  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

accepts  the  ideal  of  cultivating  the  rational  nature  in 
man  and  fighting  against  sheer  animalism.  But  when 
we  ask  for  the  beliefs  which  are  to  inspire  the  neo- 
Christians  in  this  battle  with  some  of  the  force  which 
made  the  early  Christians  die  rather  than  deny  Christ 
our  search  is  vain.  Sanctions  we  do  not  find  in  the 
system.  It  knows  little  of  what  Christ  was  in  this 
world,  nothing  of  His  present  existence  in  another. 
We  find  in  it  no  tangible  convictions  to  inspire  our 
philanthropy  and  help  us  in  the  fight  against  the 
lower  nature — not  even  a  clear  belief  in  a  God  acces- 
sible to  prayer  and  ready  to  help  us,  still  less  in  a  future 
life  in  which  we  shall  be  rewarded  or  punished.  It  pro- 
vides only  an  agreeable  imaginative  stimulus  for  refined 
minds  and  well-ordered  characters — for  those,  that  is, 
who  stand  least  in  need  of  religion.  For  all  her  claim 
to  speak  in  the  name  of  exact  thought  and  criticism, 
Mrs.  Ward  accepts  quite  uncritically  the  intellectual 
fashion  of  the  moment,  while  she  is  at  the  same  time 
the  victim  of  the  Christian  associations  of  her  youth. 
These  throw  a  halo  round  the  Christian  story  and 
give  it  still,  in  spite  of  destructive  criticism,  theoretic- 
ally accepted,  an  inspiring  force  for  her  imagination 
which  it  cannot  have  for  those  who  have  no  such 
associations  to  disguise  the  consequences  of  Meynell's 
conclusion  that  it  is  simply  a  "tale  and  a  symbol." 

The  most  definite  information  Meynell  gives  us  as 
to  what  is  meant  by  the  "hypothesis  of  faith  " — that  is, 
the  positive  side  of  religion — is  the  following  : 

What  the  saint  means  by  it  I  suppose  in  the  first  instance 
is  that  there  is  in  man  something  mysterious,  superhuman,  a 
Life  in  life,  which  can  be  indefinitely  strengthened,  enlight- 
ened, purified  till  it  reveal  to  him  the  secret  of  the  world,  till 
it  toss  him  to  the  breast  of  God,  or  again,  can  be  weakened, 


REDUCED   CHRISTIANITY  \\\ 

lost,  destroyed  till  he  relapses  into  the  animal.      Live  by  it 
[adds  Meynell],  make  the  venture.     Verificatur  vivendo. 

But  this  is  the  very  difficulty.  How,  if  the  ideal 
of  the  life  is  not  defined,  can  it  be  lived  ?  If  a  path  is 
not  traced  it  cannot  be  followed.  And,  moreover, 
even  if  the  ideal  were  clearly  depicted  how  can  the 
struggle  its  attainment  involves  be  undertaken  or  sus- 
tained if  you  give  up  belief  in  what  makes  the  struggle 
worth  while  ?  That  action,  inspired  by  certain  beliefs, 
may  make  both  those  beliefs  stronger  and  the  future 
path  of  action  clearer,  may  be  readily  granted.  In 
this  sense  we  may  believe  in  order  to  know — crede  ut 
intelligas.  But  when  many  paths  professing  to  lead 
to  a  higher  life  exist,  you  cannot  choose  from  among 
them  without  some  initial  belief  to  guide  you  in  your 
choice.  Moreover,  the  sanctions  added  by  Christian 
belief  which  make  the  harder  struggles  of  life  possible 
to  the  ordinary  man  as  well  as  to  the  philosopher,  are 
simply  swept  away. 

However  much  may  be  desirable  in  the  way  of 
getting  rid  of  really  bad  history  and  criticism  (a  very 
different  thing  it  must  be  remembered  from  adopting 
confidently  all  the  most  recent  theories  in  both  depart- 
ments), the  definite  outstanding  beliefs  of  the  Christian 
creed  are  necessary  both  to  define  what  is  the  "  Life 
in  life  "  which  we  are  to  "  strengthen  and  purify,"  and 
to  understand  in  general  what  is  the  world  scheme 
which  makes  such  an  aim  worth  our  while — which 
makes  it  the  truly  rational  course  and  not  merely  the 
gratification  of  a  mood  which  comes  at  times  to  most 
of  those  who  have  found  pleasure  unsatisfying  and 
degrading.  This  large  gap  in  Mrs.  Ward's  scheme  of 
religion—  so  large  that  it  means  the  absence  of  all  the 
most  essential  ingredients  of  religion — is  filled  up  both 


412  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

in  her  own  case  and  in  that  of  her  hero  by  sentiments 
begotten  of  an  early  Christian  training.  But  these 
sentiments  can  hardly  find  a  place  in  a  scientific 
statement  of  religion  which  dispenses  with  their 
original  exciting  cause.  Her  positive  creed — as  dis- 
tinct from  the  enthusiasm  for  destroying  what  is 
rightly  or  wrongly  judged  to  be  superstitious  and 
antiquated — is  simply  emotional.  One  appreciates 
the  sacred  feelings  associated  in  her  case  with  the 
historic  Church  and  its  historic  cathedrals — feelings 
naturally  created  in  the  course  of  a  Christian  child- 
hood. One  sympathizes  with  her  distress  at  being 
asked  to  part  with  what  is  made  precious  by  these 
treasures  of  memory.  So,  too,  one  sympathizes  with 
the  hero  of  Miss  Edgeworth's  story  who  has  been 
brought  up  as  the  scion  of  an  ancient  family  and 
discovers  in  mature  life  that  he  was  a  changeling. 
But  in  both  cases  sympathy  and  duty  point  opposite 
ways.  You  cannot  claim  a  share  in  associations  and 
possessions  the  right  to  which  is  proved  not  to  be 
yours. 

I  have  above  spoken  of  Mrs.  Ward  as  credulous 
and  uncritical  in  her  acceptance  of  modern  theories, 
and  as  the  victim  of  sentiment  in  her  desire  to  retain 
a  place  in  the  Christian  Church  for  those  who  do 
accept  those  theories.  I  venture  to  plead  for  a  clearer 
realization  of  the  issue  in  both  cases.  Meynell  might 
well  keep  his  place  in  the  Christian  Church  if  his 
attitude  towards  modern  criticism  were  more  scientific  ; 
but  if  he  accepts  wholesale  and  quite  uncritically  a 
new  theory  of  life  essentially  different  from  the 
Christian  he  should  at  least  like  Comte  form  a  new 
Church.  Nothing  is  more  obvious  to  the  careful 
critic    of    the    "higher    criticism"   than    its   constant 


REDUCED   CHRISTIANITY  413 

departure  from  the  caution  of  the  true  scientific  method. 
And  students  of  the  monuments  of  antiquity  have 
often  protested  against  its  unphilosophical  preference 
for  theory  to  observed  fact. 

The  arrogancy  of  tone  adopted  at  times  by  the  "  higher 
criticism  "  [writes  Mr.  Sayce]  has  been  productive  of  nothing 
but  mischief ;  it  has  aroused  distrust  even  of  its  most  certain 
results,  and  has  betrayed  the  critic  into  a  dogmatism  as  un- 
warranted as  it  is  unscientific.  Baseless  assumptions  have 
been  placed  on  a  level  with  ascertained  facts,  hasty  conclu- 
sions have  been  put  forward  as  principles  of  science,  and  we 
have  been  called  upon  to  accept  the  prepossessions  and 
fancies  of  the  individual  critic  as  the  revelation  of  a  new 
gospel.  If  the  archaeologist  ventured  to  suggest  that  the 
facts  he  had  discovered  did  not  support  the  views  of  the 
critic,  he  was  told  that  he  was  no  philologist.  The  opinion 
of  a  modern  German  theologian  was  worth  more,  at  all  events 
in  the  eyes  of  his  "  school,"  than  the  most  positive  testimony 
of  the  monuments  of  antiquity.1 

On  the  other  hand,  if  Mrs.  Ward  and  her  hero  are 
right  in  their  wholesale  acceptance  of  destructive 
criticism  and  of  a  naturalistic  philosophy,  it  would 
surely  be  more  satisfactory  to  frame  a  religion  which 
accords  better  with  her  intellectual  position.  Senti- 
mental affection  for  the  old  and  intellectual  acceptance 
of  the  new  are  not  uncommon.  But  in  so  serious  a 
matter  conviction  and  not  feeling  should  determine 
the  religious  creed  and  the  nature  of  the  Church. 

Auguste  Comte  was  in  essentials  far  more  reason- 
able than  the  "  reduced  Christians."  He  had  evidently, 
like  Mrs.  Ward,  a  sentimental  attachment  to  the  cere- 
monial, the  worship,  the  organization  of  the  Church  in 
which  he  was  born  and  bred.  The  French  writer, 
like  the   English,  realized  the  value  of  a  devotional 

1  Sayce,  The  Higher  Criticism  and  the  Monuments,  pp.  5 ,  6. 


4I4  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

system  and  high  examples  in  history  in  the  struggle 
of  man  against  his  lower  nature.  But  he  made  the 
effort  which  reason  demanded  to  reconcile  intellect 
and  feeling.  Having  found  in  science  the  great  guide 
to  life,  and  having  dismissed  as  unattainable  all  definite 
knowledge  of  the  supernatural,  he  made  his  Church 
correspond  with  these  convictions  and  did  not  call  his 
system  Christianity  or  keep  the  old  forms  of  worship 
which  belonged  to  an  ideal  he  had  rejected.  His 
priests  were  the  men  of  science.  His  Calendar  of 
Saints  presented  the  embodiments  of  ideals  far  more 
varied  than  those  of  Christianity — ideals  which  Mrs. 
Ward  also  accepts.  His  new  Church  frankly  admitted 
these  modern  conceptions  of  human  excellence,  and 
did  not  preserve  forms  associated  with  more  exclusive 
ideals  and  beliefs  which  he  had  definitely  rejected. 
In  ritual,  devotion  and  organization,  his  "  Church  of 
Humanity,"  while  it  derived  some  inspiration  from  the 
Christian  Church,  was  based  on  those  facts  only  which 
Comte  recognized  as  intellectually  knowable.  If  we 
eliminate  certain  points  of  detail,  in  which  the  French- 
man's lack  of  sense  of  humour  makes  us  smile,  the 
general  conception  was  rational  and  consistent.  Mrs. 
Ward  attempts  to  disguise  the  extent  of  what  is  lost 
by  using  old  forms  which  imply  that  Christianity  is  in 
some  sense  retained.  This  may  be  English  compro- 
mise, but  it  can  hardly  be  lasting,  and  at  best  is  a 
policy  which  the  far-sighted  must  see  to  be  but  the 
stepping-stone  to  acknowledged  Positivism. 

It  may  be  said  that  Mrs.  Ward  speaks  of  "  God," 
but  it  is  doubtful  to  the  present  writer  whether  the 
God  of  Pantheism  which  she  recognizes  amounts  to 
more  in  her  religion  than  the  Positivist  "  Humanity 
controlled  by  Nature  "  in  the  religion  of  Comte. 


REDUCED   CHRISTIANITY  415 

It  is  hard,  then,  to  think  of  Meynell's  system  as 
genuine  Christianity.  Even,  however,  if  it  should  gain 
in  frankness  and  cease  to  claim  Christ  as  its  founder, 
it  would  still  remain,  like  Positivism  itself,  ineffective 
as  a  religion  for  the  many. 

But  further,  if  we  take  Mrs.  Ward  on  her  own 
ground  and  consider  mainly  the  sufficiency  of  her 
religion  for  the  cultivated  classes  themselves,  her  book 
is  surely  permeated  by  one  profound  fallacy.  Its 
picture  of  the  enthusiasm  of  the  Meynellites  is  un- 
doubtedly true  to  life.  The  present  writer  has  seen 
similar  enthusiasm  in  many  well-known  zealots  for  the 
new  theology  in  different  communions.  It  consists  in 
a  passionate  zeal  for  reform — for  purging  the  Christian 
Church  of  what  they  regard  as  harmful  superstition. 
The  movement  has  in  it  something  of  the  zeal  of  an 
apostolate.  All  this  I  concede.  Am  I  not  then,  it 
will  be  asked,  conceding  all  that  Mrs.  Ward  main- 
tains ?  By  no  means.  The  enthusiasm  I  recognize 
is  that  which  belongs  to  the  work  of  reformation,  not 
to  religion.  When  this  work  of  reformation  is  accom- 
plished and  has  lost  its  novelty,  enthusiasm  can  only 
be  maintained  by  the  positive  religion  that  remains. 
And  it  is  in  respect  of  this  that,  as  I  have  pointed 
out,  the  creed  is  bare  to  nakedness.  When  the 
Puritans  had  destroyed  "  Popish  superstition  "  they 
kept  an  evangelical  faith  both  inspiring  and  helpful. 
On  this  they  lived  and  not  on  the  zeal  for  destruction 
which  was  sated.  But  when  Meynell's  reform  is 
accomplished,  there  remains  to  him  no  such  religion 
to  hold  the  enthusiasm  of  his  followers.  The  few 
remnants  of  Christian  tradition  which  Meynell  pre- 
serves include  no  beliefs  which  can  substantially  help 
men  in  the  wear  and  tear  of  life.     The  Puritans  broke 


416  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

the  statues,  but  kept  the  Bible.  Richard  Meynell's 
fanaticism  is  that  of  an  iconoclast.  This  will  inspire 
men  until  the  images  are  actually  broken,  but  it  will  not 
persuade  them  afterwards  to  worship  the  fragments. 

Surely,  then,  if  the  Higher  Criticism  has  reached 
some  of  its  most  destructive  results  by  an  unscientific 
disregard  for  facts  which  are  inconsistent  with  them, 
and  if  Mr.  Figgis  is  right  in  holding  that  the  Church 
of  England  can  still  remain  the  home  at  once  of  learn- 
ing and  of  traditional  Christianity,  it  cannot  be  justifi- 
able to  open  its  doors,  as  Richard  Meynell  demands, 
to  men  who  preach  so  meagre  a  gospel  as  that  of 
"  reduced  Christianity,"  driven  thereto  not  by  hard 
facts  but  by  ingenious  theories.  Pantheism  and  opti- 
mism are  congenial  enough  to  human  society  in  the 
heyday  of  life  :  the  Christian  Church  has  been  forcibly 
depicted  by  Newman  as  the  providential  antidote 
against  them — as  set  up  to  remind  us  of  "  the  hateful 
cypresses  " — of  death,  sin,  judgment,  and  of  the  beliefs 
which  are  needed  to  face  these  ugly  facts.  If  the 
Church  of  England  can  share  in  this  work  and  still  be 
a  bulwark  or  breakwater  against  infidelity,  can  it  be 
wise  to  cripple  her  power  in  this  respect  by  admitting 
to  her  ministry  those  who  go  so  very  near  to  holding 
the  very  attitude  towards  life  which  Christianity  is  set 
up  to  oppose — and  this  (I  repeat  it)  not  under  pres- 
sure from  the  consensus  of  experts  in  science  but  in 
deference  to  the  dogmatism  of  extremist  leaders  and 
the  credulity  of  their  followers  ?  If,  as  Meynell  main- 
tains, "reduced  Christians"  are  already  admitted  to 
the  ministry  but  dare  not  as  things  stand  openly  avow 
their  beliefs,  surely  reform  should  be  in  the  direction 
of  the  exclusion  of  what  is  alien  to  Christianity  and 
not  of  capitulating  openly  to  the  enemy  ? 


REDUCED   CHRISTIANITY  417 

In  appending  a  few  words  to  compare  Mr.  Figgis's 
apologetic  with  methods  more  familiar  to  Catholics,  I 
wish  to  build  a  bridge  between  the  two  in  order  to 
prevent  misconception.  Mr.  Figgis  says  in  many 
places  that  it  is  not  on  "  reason  "  but  on  "  life  "  that 
religion  is  built  up,  and  he  has  much  to  say  of  "  reli- 
gious experience "  as  justifying  belief.  To  a  hasty 
reader  such  language  may  appear  to  savour  of  prag- 
matism or  of  subjectivism.  But  this  would  be  a  great 
misconception  of  the  writer's  meaning.  I  do  not  care 
to  defend  all  Mr.  Figgis's  phrases,  but  his  general 
drift  is  quite  clearly  other  than  this  criticism  supposes. 
Mr.  Figgis  strongly  repudiates  pragmatism,  and  in  his 
preface  he  clearly  locates  his  argument  as  belong- 
ing to  the  region  in  which  the  subjective  element  has 
no  tendency  to  issue  in  subjectivism,  namely,  the  per- 
sonal frame  of  mind  of  the  individual  in  approaching 
the  proofs  of  religion.  "  I  have  tried,"  he  writes,  "  to 
remove  difficulties  which  prevent  the  evidence  pro- 
ducing its  proper  weight."  A  man,  as  our  theologians 
express  it,  is  "  led  prudently  to  believe "  in  conse- 
quence of  certain  evidence.  The  conclusion  is 
"credible"  and  "certain"  but  not  "evidently  true." 
It  is  not  such  as  to  preclude  the  possibility  of  doubt, 
though  the  doubt  which  remains  possible  is  not  the 
doubt  of  a  "prudent  man."  There  is  some  danger 
lest  Mr.  Figgis's  expressions  just  referred  to  should 
be  considered  as  referring  directly  to  what  is  regarded 
in  technical  theology  as  "evidence  of  credibility,"  but 
in  point  of  fact  they  concern  rather  the  "prudent" 
attitude  of  mind,  and  the  disposition  of  the  will,  which 
are  the  final  determining  cause  of  belief.  Lacordaire, 
as  I  have  noted  above,  said  that  the  reasons  for  his 
conversion  to  Christianity  were  reasons  he  had  always 

2   E 


4i 8  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

known ;  but  a  personal  change  came  to  him,  which 
led  to  their  affecting  him  differently.  His  own  per- 
sonal reaction  on  the  reasons  changed ;  and,  to  use 
the  expressions  of  theology,  the  imprudent  doubt  or 
disbelief  was  exchanged  for  the  belief  of  a  prudent 
man.  When  Mr.  Figgis  talks  of  "life"  and  "experi- 
ence" as  contributing  to  bring  about  belief  and  to 
justify  religion  to  the  individual,  he  is  dealing  primarily 
with  this  matter  of  psychology,  with  the  variations  of 
the  dispositions  of  the  will  brought  about  by  the 
experience  of  life  and  not  substituting  religious  feeling 
for  the  "  notes  of  the  Church."  All  theologians  admit 
that  we  need  the  pia  affectio  voluntatis.  But  an 
experimental  examination  into  the  variations  of  the 
disposition  of  mind  and  will  in  individual  cases  is 
obviously  most  important. 

This  is  a  matter  perhaps  too  little  considered  by 
apologists,  and  presents  more  varieties  in  a  society 
where  believer  and  unbeliever  are  constantly  exchang- 
ing views  than  it  does  either  in  an  age  of  faith  or  for 
those  who  live  in  a  society  where  such  questions  are 
not  discussed.  Moreover,  it  must  never  be  forgotten 
that  while  to  base  belief  on  "  religious  experience  "  is 
dangerous,  the  opposite  extreme  of  denying  the  reality 
of  such  experience  would  be  to  discredit  half  our 
hagiology  and  to  set  down  St.  Teresa  and  St.  John 
of  the  Cross  as  dreamers.  The  reality  of  communion 
with  God  in  prayer  may  not  be  appealed  to  technically 
as  evidential.  Yet  it  is  not  a  fact  which  either  Popes 
or  congregations  have  been  disposed  to  deny.  And 
the  effect  of  such  experiences  on  the  moral  disposi- 
tions is  a  fact  for  which  there  is  room  in  every  variety 
of  the  analysis  of  faith. 

The    reason   why   theologians   are   cautious   and 


REDUCED  CHRISTIANITY  419 

authority  rigid  in  respect  of  loose  language  about 
"religious  experience"  is  because  it  runs  so  easily 
into  mere  subjectivism  in  religion.  No  one  could 
protest  more  emphatically  against  this  danger  than 
Mr.  Figgis.  On  the  other  hand,  if  we  avoid  all 
reference  to  "  religious  experience  "  in  the  lives  of 
individuals  and  in  the  determination  of  their  beliefs, 
we  must  bowdlerize  our  saints'  lives  and  condemn  as 
heterodox  all  mystical  theology. 

In  one  respect,  however,  a  Catholic  must  approach 
the  whole  subject  dealt  with  in  these  books  from  an 
opposite  standpoint  from  Mr.  Figgis.  Mr.  Figgis  is 
attempting  to  restore  to  the  Anglican  Church  much 
which  the  Catholic  Church  has  never  lost.  It  is  hard 
for  him  to  gain  from  the  Church  of  England  the  sup- 
port of  an  objective  witness  to  religious  truth  as  a 
remedy  for  subjectivism  because  he  and  his  friends  are 
but  a  party  in  that  Church,  urging  their  particular  way 
of  viewing  things.  The  chief  compensating  advantage 
to  him,  from  a  controversial  point  of  view,  is  that  one 
who  constructs  a  new  system  is  free  to  select  the 
arguments  which  appeal  most  forcibly  to  the  present 
age.  On  the  other  hand,  the  Catholic  and  Roman 
Church  has  jealously  excluded  those  currents  of 
thought  which  have  caused  the  disruption  of  the 
Church  of  England.  Our  strength  lies  in  our  con- 
servative principles.  We  only  relinquish  traditional 
beliefs  or  apologetic  methods  and  arguments  when 
it  is  plainly  necessary.  Therefore  it  is  harder  for  us 
to  make  changes  even  when  the  advances  of  criticism 
do  call  for  them.  The  decrees  against  Galileo  were 
repealed  only  in  the  nineteenth  century.  Our  first 
principles  have,  in  their  appeal  to  the  world,  all  the 
dignity    and    force    of    what   has    been    consistently 


420  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

acted    on.        But    our    history    also    makes    harder 
those  modifications  in  detail  which  are  necessary  in 
order  that  our  apologists  should  have  due  influence 
with    the    more    thoughtful    contemporary    religious 
inquirers.     We    certainly    gain    more   than   we    lose. 
"  Things  seen  are  mightier  than  things  heard,"  and 
"example  is  better  than  precept."     To  act  on  true 
principles  continually  and  from  time  immemorial  is  a 
more  forcible  proof  that  those   principles   can   stand 
the  test  of  life  than  to  recommend  them  by  persuasive 
arguments.     But  the  isolation  from  the  modern  world 
of  thought  which   has   been  the   condition   of  their 
preservation  has  also,  perhaps,  made  us  insufficiently 
alive  to  the  new  points  of  view  familiar  to  that  world. 
It  is  a  question  whether  we  are  not  in  consequence 
becoming  unable  to  make  those  without  see  the  force 
of  views  which  were  they  within  the  Church   they 
would  feel  in  fact  to  have  the  marks  of  what  is  deep 
and  true.     For  the  world  reads  what  we  say  in  its 
own  context  and  the  context  of  the  Church  is  very 
different. 

This  is  why  I  venture  to  think  that  we  might  all 
study  with  profit — though  not  with  complete  agree- 
ment— such  works  as  those  of  Mr.  Chesterton  and 
Mr.  Figgis,  who  often  express  in  a  manner  which 
appeals  forcibly  to  the  modern  world  ideas  which  find 
their  fullest  expression  in  action  within  the  Catholic 
Church  itself. 


XIV 

PAPERS    READ    BEFORE    THE 
SYNTHETIC   SOCIETY 

I.  THE  AIM  OF  THE  SYNTHETIC  SOCIETY.1 

The  thought  of  forming  the  Synthetic  Society  first 
occurred  to  a  few  persons  differing  from  each  other  in 
theological  opinion,  and  yet  equally  desirous  of  union 
in  the  effort  to  find  a  philosophical  basis  for  religious 
belief.  It  is  generally  felt  that  more  than  a  century 
of  destructive  criticism  has  at  least  impaired  the 
effectiveness  of  the  traditionary  systems  of  natural 
theology.  The  religious  inquirer  is  no  longer  able  to 
view  them  as  exhaustive  and  practically  irrefragable 
demonstrations  of  Theism  and  Immortality.  The 
absolute  ascendency  they  long  enjoyed  would  seem 
in  part  to  have  been  due  to  those  very  Christian  in- 
fluences for  which  they  professed  to  be  a  philosophical 
foundation.  They  are  the  lineal  descendants  of  the 
systems  in  vogue  in  medieval  Christendom.  The 
first  principles  whence  they  start,  whether  or  no  they 
may  prove,  on  thorough  consideration,  to  be  exact, 
have  at  least  been  so  far  questioned  as  to  disprove 
their  claim  to  be  unquestionable.  They  are  such  as 
to  have  been  readily  accepted  in  a  society  in  which 

1  This  paper  was  read  at  the  inaugural  meeting  of  the  Society,  on 
February  28,  1896. 


422  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

dogmatic  belief  was  the  intellectual  characteristic. 
Further,  the  logical  progress  from  these  first  principles 
to  conclusions  already  imbedded  in  the  daily  life  of 
such  a  society  was  not  likely  to  be  viewed  critically. 
De  facillimis  non  est  hie  disputatio  were  the  words 
in  which  one  scholastic  doctor  excused  himself  from 
even  entering  into  the  proof  of  Theism.  Unsparing 
hostile  criticism  has  since  shown,  at  all  events,  that 
the  systems  in  question  needed  much  fuller  philoso- 
phical consideration  and  elaboration  than  they  had  yet 
received  alike  as  to  premises  and  as  to  proofs.  The 
problems  they  treated  as  simple  and  solved  so  sym- 
metrically were  found  to  be  complex  and  encompassed 
with  difficulty.  It  was  not  to  be  expected  that  this 
should  be  generally  seen  at  a  time  when  the  universal 
ascendency  of  Christian  beliefs  made  a  philosophy  of 
Theism  seem  to  the  multitude  almost  a  superfluous 
concession  to  the  lovers  of  methodical  argument.  But 
as  a  soldier  whose  reputation  has  been  won  by  neat- 
ness of  uniform  and  perfection  of  drill  in  time  of  peace 
may  fail  when  war  tests  his  endurance  and  nerve,  so 
these  symmetrical  proofs  may  be  found  inadequate  to 
bear  the  brunt  of  the  battle  when  religious  belief  is 
seriously  assailed. 

The  Natural  Theologies,  then,  shared  the  fate  of 
those  a  priori  philosophies  with  which  they  were  so 
closely  connected.  A  rigid  scrutiny  of  the  facts  of 
human  experience,  physical  and  psychical,  and  of  the 
limitations  of  the  human  faculties  of  knowledge,  dis- 
credited them  with  many.  No  attempt  can  here  be 
made  to  trace  the  history  of  their  decline.  What  had 
been  threatening  since  the  rise  of  the  inductive  philo- 
sophy took  substantial  form  in  the  last  century.  Hume 
and  Kant  may  serve  as  landmarks.     The  shock  given 


PAPERS  READ  BEFORE  THE  SYNTHETIC  SOCIETY     423 

to  believers  by  the  destructive  method  of  Hume 
received  an  additional  impetus  from  its  practical 
endorsement  in  the  speculative  philosophy  of  Kant, 
and  from  his  rejection  as  theoretically  invalid  alike  of 
the  Ontological,  the  Cosmological,  and  the  Teleological 
proofs  of  Theism.  This  result  was  not  at  once 
counteracted  by  the  hopes  held  out  in  that  philosopher's 
ethical  works  and  Critique  of  Practical  Reason.  It 
became  widely  maintained  that  the  religious  philosophy 
of  medieval  times  was  in  reality  largely  due  to  a 
temper  of  mind  which  accepted  dogmatic  first  principles 
uncritically,  and  to  an  ethical  atmosphere  which  sup- 
plemented any  defects  in  the  argumentative  processes 
commonly  employed.  A  society  which  was  largely  a 
Christian  Theocracy  was  not  likely  to  question  readily 
the  very  basis  of  its  constitution. 

This  admission  appeared  perhaps  for  a  time  tanta- 
mount to  a  triumph  for  the  destructive  critics.  Religious 
belief  seemed  to  have  been  due,  not  to  its  professed 
philosophical  basis — which  was  unsatisfactory — but  to 
certain  peculiarities  in  the  mental  and  moral  atmo- 
sphere which  prevailed  in  the  Middle  Ages.  Those 
elements,  at  all  events,  which  separate  Christian 
Theism  from  an  unpractical  Deism  appeared  to  fall 
outside  the  sphere  of  truths  whose  philosophical 
character  was  generally  admitted.  An  intellectual 
fashion  of  individualism  and  negation  succeeded.  The 
empirical  principles  on  which  it  rested  were  handed 
down  in  our  own  land  from  Hume  to  the  two  Mills. 
They  were  popularized  far  and  wide  by  Huxley  in  the 
memory  of  us  all. 

Our  own  time,  however,  has  become  increasingly 
sensitive  to  the  inadequacy  of  the  various  systems  of 
destructive  philosophy,  as  failing  to  account  even  for 


424  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

universally  acknowledged  truths,  and  as  incommensu- 
rate with  the  facts  of  human  nature.  Above  all 
things  its  inability  either  to  explain,  or  to  explain 
away,  the  religious  aspirations  or  the  religious  con- 
sciousness has  been  increasingly  felt.  This  defect 
had  indeed  been  noted  from  the  early  days  of  its 
influence.  It  suggested  at  the  outset  to  Kant  his 
practical  philosophy  which  restored  those  beliefs 
which  his  Critique  of  Pure  Reason  had  failed  to 
justify.  It  was  likewise  the  basis  of  the  traditionalism 
of  a  Catholic  thinker  like  De  Bonald,  who  to  some 
extent  accepted  the  criticisms  passed  by  Locke  and 
Hume  on  the  old  a  priori  thinkers  and  appealed  to 
the  traditions  of  society  as  evidence  of  the  interference 
and  guidance  of  a  power  more  than  human.  It  formed 
a  basis  of  agreement  between  such  opposite  thinkers 
as  Comte  and  Lamennais,  both  of  whom  abandoned 
the  a  priori  methods  and  sought  for  a  philosophy  of 
religion  elsewhere  than  in  individual  introspection. 
One  found  it  in  the  purely  emotional  and  ceremonial 
system  of  the  Positivist  worship ;  the  other  in 
Catholicism  as  representing  the  corporate  decisions 
of  humanity.  The  history  of  the  Church  was  to 
Lamennais  the  summing  up  of  the  spiritual  traditions 
and  experiences  of  the  race.  The  human  race  in  its 
corporate  aspect  could  grasp  what  eluded  the  intel- 
lectual apprehension  of  the  individual. 

These  are  early  instances  of  the  refusal  to  acquiesce 
in  the  negations  of  empiricism  and  of  attempts  to  frame, 
on  those  convictions  which  remained  alike  unaccounted 
for  and  undestroyed  by  the  negative  systems,  a  con- 
structive philosophy  to  replace  the  old  natural  theo- 
logies. In  more  recent  years  such  attempts  have  been 
many  and  various.     Thinkers  of  various  schools  have 


PAPERS  READ  BEFORE  THE  SYNTHETIC  SOCIETY    425 

vindicated  for  some  of  those  ethical  elements  in  the 
individual  and  in  society,  to  which  the  destructive 
critics  had  traced  religious  belief,  a  really  philosophical 
character.  Kantian  doctrine  and  an  appeal  to  the 
principles  of  social  philosophy  have  in  some  cases 
combined,  and  both  have  tended  to  admit  the  sceptical 
results  of  purely  speculative  thought  in  the  individual, 
and  to  regard  a  true  philosophy  as  wider  and  more 
practical  in  its  scope. 

The  evolution  theory,  though  ushered  in  under 
the  banner  of  Agnosticism,  seems  to  many  to  give 
new  meaning  and  perhaps  new  promise  to  the 
attempt  to  construct,  by  the  consideration  of  man- 
kind corporately,  a  basis  for  beliefs  which  it  is  diffi- 
cult to  justify,  at  all  events  with  irresistible  cogency, 
by  a  purely  individualistic  philosophy.  The  greatest 
of  the  medieval  schoolmen  urged  the  necessity  of 
teaching  Theism  and  not  leaving  it  to  individuals 
to  ascertain  it  by  philosophical  reasoning — an  attempt, 
he  added,  in  which  very  few  would  practically  succeed, 
however  cogent  in  the  abstract  the  proofs  of  God's 
existence  might  be.  Were  the  individual  mind 
left  without  external  teaching  of  this  great  truth  (he 
declared),  "the  human  race  would  remain  in  the 
greatest  darkness  of  ignorance."  What  was  here 
stated  as  a  practical  fact  of  human  experience  in 
days  when  philosophy  was  limited  in  its  scope  by 
technical  restrictions,  should,  we  suppose,  be  taken 
into  account  by  any  philosophy  which  professes  to  be 
commensurate  with  human  nature.  If  the  actual 
causes  of  important  convictions  are  to  be  found 
historically  in  the  social  influences  surrounding  the 
individual,  and  if  our  knowledge  and  our  very  facul- 
ties of   knowing  have  been  developed   by  the  social 


426  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

environment  of  successive  generations,  the  study  of 
sociology  and  of  evolution  is  clearly  necessary  to  an 
adequate  philosophy  of  the  existing  human  mind.  And 
if,  after  all,  the  philosopher  must  finally  come  back  to 
a  form  of  individualism  ;  if  the  thinker  is  reminded 
that  after  doing  his  best  to  appraise  all  corporate 
influences  and  all  causes  of  belief,  his  final  decision 
must  remain  his  own  ;  if  he  is  even  led  back  to 
some  of  the  first  principles  which  he  had  previously  dis- 
missed as  unduly  dogmatic,  the  road  he  has  traversed 
may  well  have  been  instructive.  He  has  made 
an  advance  parallel  to  the  Kantian  transition  from 
dogmatism  to  criticism,  though  with  a  different 
result.  First  principles,  which  were  unjustifiable  when 
they  professed  to  be  obvious  axioms,  vouched  for 
solely  by  the  direct  insight  of  the  individual  mind, 
may  acquire  a  securer  basis  by  the  consideration  of 
their  origin,  of  their  results  in  history  and  in  society, 
and  again  of  the  results  of  their  denial.  What  seemed 
at  first  arbitrary  may  be  found  to  be  indissolubly 
linked  with  what  even  hostile  critics  perforce  admit. 
Its  denial  may  be  found  to  involve  the  questioning 
of  principles  without  which  the  human  mind  is  unable 
to  work  at  all.  In  such  a  case  the  character  of  a 
primary  axiom  may  be  restored  from  the  reflected 
light  thrown  back  by  the  fuller  examination  of  results. 
Again,  the  full  consideration  of  the  social  or  his- 
torical standpoint  leaves  its  effect  on  the  intellectual 
attitude  of  the  inquirer.  The  philosopher  feels,  at  the 
end  of  the  process,  far  more  a  learner,  far  less  a  judge. 
He  should  have  acquired  some  of  the  humility  which 
generally  follows  the  prolonged  application  of  the 
experimental  method.  This  may  show  itself  in  various 
ways.     To   remember   the   speculative  efforts  of  his 


PAPERS  READ  BEFORE  THE  SYNTHETIC  SOCIETY    427 

ancestors,  with  their  repeated  failures,  is  a  cure  for 
philosophical  egotism  or  eccentricity  in  the  individual. 
He  learns  from  the  experience  of  others  the  direction 
of  least  resistance,  and  his  own  contribution  becomes 
better  regulated  if  more  modest.  Again,  the  study  of 
the  sources  of  conviction  in  others  makes  a  man  aware 
of  the  impalpable  forces  influencing  his  own  mind. 
Familiarity  with  the  recurring  cycle  of  the  history  of 
thought,  and  with  the  numerous  and  subtle  influences 
in  society  actually  causing  belief,  must  give  both  a 
caution  and  a  discriminating  receptivity  which  were 
wanting  to  the  dogmatist.  If,  for  example,  the  same 
alternate  tendencies  to  scepticism  and  dogmatism  have 
recurred  in  the  same  order  repeatedly,  as  though  by  a 
kind  of  natural  law,  the  thinker  who  remembers  the 
law  has  an  advantage  which  is  wanting  to  him  who 
follows  the  tendency  of  his  own  mind  regardless  of 
surrounding  influences.  Such  a  thinker  allows  for  a 
current  which  may  carry  the  other  all  unconsciously 
away.  And  the  presence  around  us  of  a  large  variety 
of  systems  of  religious  thought,  each  embodying  some 
instructive  human  experience,  none  without  some 
characteristic  truth,  each  yet  presenting,  in  the  eyes 
of  its  opponents,  likewise  characteristic  error,  must,  we 
suppose,  call  for  a  similar  combination  of  criticism  and 
receptivity. 

But  to  pursue  such  a  suggestion  further,  or  to 
define  it  with  greater  precision,  would  be  beyond  the 
purpose  of  this  sketch.  Lotze's  Microcosmus  is  an 
example  alike  of  a  philosophy  having  regard  to  both 
standpoints — the  social  and  the  individual — and  of  the 
mental  attitude  to  which  such  a  philosophy  naturally 
leads. 

We  have  spoken  so  far  mainly  of  the  doubt  thrown 


428  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

on  the  old  natural  theology  by  a  new  realization  that 
much  of  its  influence  depended  on  convictions  proper 
to  a  special  time  and  a  special  society.  A  change  in 
some  respects  similar  is  taking  place  in  regard  to  the 
Scriptures.  The  recent  advances  in  biblical  criticism 
have,  we  suppose,  brought  home  to  an  increasing 
number  the  circumstances  of  time  and  place  which  had 
their  influence  in  the  production  of  the  Scriptures  as  we 
receive  them.  It  has  been  the  defect  of  an  uncritical 
age  not  to  take  these  circumstances  sufficiently  into 
account  in  estimating  the  nature  of  the  knowledge  we 
may  expect  to  derive  from  the  Inspired  Word. 

Again,  the  study  of  comparative  religions  has 
become  more  general,  and  has  necessarily  had  its 
bearing  on  our  view  of  Christianity.  These  two 
sciences  will  fall  within  the  scope  of  the  Society,  it  is 
to  be  supposed,  exactly  so  far  as  they  are  required  to 
illustrate  the  truly  philosophical  attitude  in  their  regard 
at  which  the  religious  inquirer  should  aim — the  change 
in  theological  analysis  which  the  advance  of  such 
sciences  must  involve,  and  the  compatibility  of  such 
change  with  permanent  religious  convictions. 

It  may  be  added  that  the  phrase  "working  philo- 
sophy of  religious  belief,"  used  in  the  rules  of  the 
Society,  is  designed  to  indicate  that  our  ultimate 
object  is  a  practical  one ;  and  that  while  technical 
metaphysics  will  obviously  have  its  place  in  the  dis- 
cussions, it  will  be  open  to  those  who  think  that  the 
best  working  philosophy  is  to  be  found  in  a  direction 
other  than  the  purely  metaphysical  to  say  so.  Indeed, 
in  the  case  of  metaphysical  speculation,  as  in  that  of 
the  consideration  of  comparative  religion,  it  is  to  be 
hoped  that  its  treatment  will  be  guided  by  the  degree  to 
which  it  can  be  helpful  in  attaining  our  main  purpose. 


PAPERS  READ  BEFORE   THE  SYNTHETIC  SOCIETY    429 

It  is  not  expected  that  the  point  of  view  we  have 
attempted  to  indicate  will  prove  to  be  precisely  that 
of  other  members  of  the  Society.  But  what  has  been 
said  may  serve  to  show  the  light  in  which  a  problem 
as  to  whose  urgency  many  are  agreed  has  presented 
itself  to  a  few. 

The  promoters  of  the  Society  are  well  aware  of 
the  wide  divergence  to  be  looked  for  among  different 
thinkers  who  are  equally  desirous  of  a  constructive 
philosophy  adapted  to  existing  circumstances.  But 
it  is  hoped  that  the  unity  of  aim  will  give  to  the 
discussions  a  useful  and  critical,  rather  than  a 
polemical,  character.  Whether  any  approximation 
to  general  agreement  will  be  attained  remains  to  be 
seen.  At  any  rate,  it  is  hoped  that  discussion  with 
a  common  object  will  promote  good  feeling  amid  such 
theological  differences  as  exist,  and  may  be  a  step 
towards  that  real  union  among  those  desirous  of 
maintaining  the  religious  basis  of  human  society,  which 
at  the  present  time  is  so  far  from  existing,  and  is  yet 
so  greatly  to  be  desired. 

II.  THE  SOCIAL  OR  HISTORICAL  STANDPOINT 

The  object  of  this  Memorandum  is  to  elucidate  the 
distinction,  drawn  in  the  paper  on  the  SyntJietic 
Society, '  between  the  social  or  historical  standpoint 
and  the  individual  standpoint  in  philosophy,  and  to 
indicate  its  possible  utility  in  reference  to  problems 
which  may  come  before  the  Society.  The  writer 
will  endeavour  to  illustrate  his  meaning  by  simple 
instances  taken  from  the  controversy  with  empiricism. 

1  The  paper  referred  to  was  the  preceding  one,  read  at  the  preliminary 
meeting  of  the  Society. 


430  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

One  prominent  matter  of  debate  in  the  papers 
of  the  old  Metaphysical  Society  was  the  attempt  of 
the  empiricists — from  Hume  to  J.  S.  Mill — to  deny 
to  the  mind  the  power  of  intuition,  and  to  trace  all 
our  knowledge  to  sensible  experience.  The  method 
used  by  the  intuitionist  in  this  controversy  was  that 
of  individual  self-analysis.  He  appealed  to  beliefs 
accepted  as  valid  by  intuitionist  and  empiricist  alike ; 
analyzed  their  logical  basis ;  showed  that  this  must 
include  certain  primary  intuitions  irreducible  to  ex- 
perience. The  empiricist  was  challenged  to  examine 
his  own  mind,  to  apply  the  intuitionist  analysis,  and 
to  show  if  he  could  that  the  conclusion  was  not  inevit- 
able— that  the  beliefs  in  question  rested  on  intuitions. 
The  crucial  part  of  the  process,  on  either  side,  was 
individual  introspection.  The  case  was  decided  by 
the  verdict  of  accurate  self-analysis.  The  standpoint 
on  either  side  was  that  of  the  individual  examining 
his  own  mind. 

Among  the  issues  fought  out  by  this  method  were 
the  intuitive  character  of  memory,  the  intuitive  basis  of 
necessary  truth,  the  nature  of  the  primary  ethical  per- 
ceptions. Huxley  had  traced  our  confidence  in  memory 
to  our  experie?ice  of  its  truthfulness.  The  intuitionist 
challenged  him  to  analyze  his  own  mind  more  accu- 
rately. He  could  not  know  that  memory  had  been 
truthful  in  the  past  without  first  trusting  its  own 
avouchment.  Nor  could  any  argument  justify  our 
trust  in  the  most  positive  assertions  of  memory  as 
to  recent  events.  To  ?mderstand  an  argument  you 
must  trust  that  memory  which  connects  the  first 
part  of  a  sentence  with  the  last.  It  is  a  condition 
of  all  coherent  reasoning  that  the  memory  should 
be  trusted.     Our  trust  in  it  is  therefore  ultimate. 


PAPERS  READ  BEFORE  THE  SYNTHETIC  SOCIETY     431 

So,  too,  it  was  argued  in  the  case  of  the  empirical 
theory  that  belief  in  necessary  truth  is  based  on 
induction.  You  must  necessarily  admit  that  the  belief 
that  the  truths  of  geometry  obtain  universally  is 
more  than  an  induction  from  experience,  because  to 
observe  carefully  one  instance  in  which  a  trilateral 
figure  is  triangular  proves  to  you  that  all  trilaterals 
must  be  triangular. 

Again,  you  must  admit  (it  was  argued)  the 
simplicity  of  the  idea  of  "  moral  worth  " — that  it  is 
something  distinct  from  the  idea  of  "beneficial  to  the 
race  "  to  which  some  of  the  older  utilitarians  reduced 
it — because  you  yourself  must  recognize  that  to  say 
"  whatever  is  beneficial  to  the  race  is  good  "  is  far  from 
being  the  tautologous  proposition  M  whatever  is  good 
is  good." 

So  far  (I  repeat)  each  party  appealed  to  the 
analysis  of  the  individual  mind — to  instances  in  which 
mental  experience  is  the  same,  and  the  only  question 
is  of  true  and  false  analysis  ;  and  the  intuitionist 
claimed  that  by  the  inevitable  confession  of  his 
antagonists  his  own  analysis  was  shown  on  these 
points  to  be  the  true  one.  He  claimed  a  victory,  and 
set  down  as  admitted  first  principles  that  our  trust  in 
memory  is  ultimate  and  intuitive ;  that  the  acceptance 
of  necessary  truths  is  not  of  the  nature  of  an  induction, 
but  is  intuitive,  or  derived  from  intuition  ;  that  the  idea 
of  moral  worth  is  a  simple  idea,  and  not  identical  with 
"beneficial  to  the  race,"  or  with  other  suggested 
analyses  of  its  import. 

If  the  controversy  ended  here,  if  to  show  that 
Hume  and  the  Mills  had  denied  what  the  analysis 
of  the  human  mind  clearly  establishes,  were  tanta- 
mount   to    a    philosophy   of    religion,    it    might    be 


432  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

unnecessary  to  consider  another  standpoint.  But  this 
is  not  so. 

The  admission  of  certain  axioms  as  primary,  and 
even  as  known  by  intuition,  does  not  necessarily 
involve  the  admission  of  all  the  axioms  postulated  in 
a  Theistic  philosophy.  You  may  bring  the  empiricist, 
as  Mill  was  brought,  to  admit  memory  as  an  ultimate 
means  of  knowledge,  but  he  may  stop  short,  as  Mill 
did,  of  the  intuition  of  causation.  You  may  prove  the 
inadequacy  of  the  idea  "  beneficial  "  as  an  explanation 
of  "  good " ;  but  you  still  have  before  you  subtler 
explanations  of  the  ethical  judgments,  referring  con- 
science to  the  early  fear  of  father  and  ruler,  or  to  the 
associations  created  early  in  life  by  punishment  for  a 
certain  class  of  actions,  or  to  the  still  more  complicated 
genesis  suggested  by  the  evolutionists.  Again,  the 
endeavour  to  connect  the  moral  perceptions  with 
knowledge  of  God  may  raise  further  questions  in 
which  no  agreement  can  be  obtained  between  the 
analyses  of  different  thinkers.  You  may  have  won 
the  admission  that  geometrical  truth  is  necessary ; 
but  you  have  yet  to  win  assent  to  the  proposition  that 
space  is  objective — that  necessary  truth  is  more  than 
subjective  consistency  in  the  a  priori  elements  which 
the  mind  brings  with  it  as  a  condition  of  experience. 
And  both  the  objective  character  of  space  and  the 
objective  validity  of  synthetic  a  priori  judgments  are 
important  elements  in  more  than  one  version  of  the 
philosophical  basis  of  Theism. 

And  here  arises  the  problem  which  first  suggests 
what  I  have  called  the  social  or  historical  standpoint 
at  its  narrowest  angle  of  departure  from  the  individual 
standpoint.  Hitherto  beliefs  have  been  considered  in 
which  the  decision  of  all  minds  is  really  similar,  and  in 


PAPERS  READ  BEFORE  THE  SYNTHETIC  SOCIETY     433 

the  case  of  which  apparent  differences  are  resolvable 
into  a  true  and  a  false  analysis  of  similar  convictions. 
Thus  a  direct  issue  was  possible  from  the  individu- 
alistic standpoint.  All  men  really  trust  their  memories 
in  certain  cases,  as  an  ultimate  trust,  assumed  in  the 
very  attempt  to  offer  proof  that  there  are  prior  motives 
for  the  trust.  All  men  really  hold  particular  geometrical 
truths  to  obtain  universally,  on  the  examination  of  one 
instance,  and  not  as  an  induction  from  many.  Here 
the  empiricists  had  simply  failed  in  their  analysis  of 
experiences  common  to  all. 

But  when  we  get  to  the  further  questions  just 
referred  to  it  is  otherwise.  Is  the  use  of  the  causation 
argument  for  Theism  valid  ?  Does  causation  really 
involve  more  than  succession  ?  Does  the  human 
mind  affirm  with  right  the  objective  character  of 
space  ?  These  questions  are  found  to  involve  ulti- 
mate differences,  not  of  analysis,  but  of  first  principles. 
Individualism  comes  to  a  deadlock.  Its  weapons  no 
longer  apply.  Either  we  abandon  all  hope  of  agree- 
ment, and  end  with  the  statement  on  either  side  that 
"  orthodoxy  is  my  doxy,"  or  we  make  some  attempt 
to  trace  the  history  of  differences  between  mind  and 
mind,  hoping  to  discover  their  source,  and  thus  to 
effect  a  reconciliation,  or  to  join  issue  on  a  prior  stage 
in  the  argument.  We  leave  the  study  of  the  indi- 
vidual mind  and  take  up  the  social  standpoint. 

The  philosopher  no  longer  merely  analyzes  his 
own  mental  experiences,  treating  this  process  as  a 
final  appeal,  stating  it  that  others  may  apply  it  to 
their  own  minds,  and  test  how  far  it  reveals  defects  in 
their  analysis.  He  employs  a  different  method.  He 
questions  his  own  most  positive  and  ultimate  convic- 
tions by  comparing  them  with  those  of  others.     He 

2  F 


434  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

looks  on  himself  from  outside,  as  a  unit  acted  on  by 
social  influences  ;  and  questions  the  source  of  the  first 
principles  he  has  accepted.  He  looks  along  the  line 
of  history  to  see  if  he  can  ascertain  a  reason  for  ulti- 
mate differences  between  one  mind  and  another,  and 
if  that  reason  can  throw  any  light  on  the  question — 
which  of  the  opposing  first  principles  is  right  ?  He 
becomes  provisionally  a  doubter,  where  he  had  been 
positive.  The  thinker  who  is  thus  hesitating  between 
the  two  views  (above  referred  to)  concerning  causation 
and  space  may  undoubtedly  learn  something  from 
tracing  the  history  of  the  controversy  between  the 
empirical  and  the  a  priori  schools.  He  may  come  to 
the  conclusion  that  the  early  success  of  the  empiricists 
was  due  to  the  fact  that  a  dogmatic  age  had  been  too 
ready  to  multiply  dogmatic  first  principles,  which  it 
was  really  beyond  the  power  of  the  human  mind  law- 
fully to  affirm  ;  that  the  protest  of  Bacon,  echoed  by 
Locke,  against  the  theorizing  of  the  intellectus  sibi per- 
missus  had  in  it  a  measure  of  obvious  justice  ;  that  the 
subsequent  reaction  against  empiricism  was  due  to  a 
similar  exaggeration  on  the  part  of  such  empiricists  as 
Hume,  who,  in  their  zeal  to  expose  the  false  preten- 
sions of  the  advocates  of  "innate  ideas,"  eventually 
denied  to  the  mind  powers  which  must  really  be 
assumed  as  valid  in  the  simplest  and  most  obvious 
reasoning  processes — powers  which  can  be  justified  by 
no  external  test,  as  the  human  mind  has  no  test  at  its 
command  which  it  can  apply  without  using  the  very 
powers  and  processes  whose  validity  is  to  be  tested. 

Here,  in  an  instance  I  have  chosen  for  its  great 
simplicity,  a  glance  at  history  does  reveal  the  root  of 
divergence  in  first  principles.  Neither  party  was 
wholly  right ;   yet   both   held  a   characteristic   truth. 


PAPERS  READ  BEFORE  THE  SYNTHETIC  SOCIETY   435 

The  dogmatism  of  scholastic  days  and  the  caution 
bred  by  the  rise  of  induction  each  formed  a  temper  of 
mind  which  tended,  one  to  exaggerate,  the  other  to 
minimize,  the  power  of  the  human  faculties  to  rise 
above  sensible  knowledge.  The  individual  who  had 
been  influenced  by  the  maxims  of  either  age  had  to 
correct  his  mind's  spontaneous  decision  by  allowing 
for  the  current. 

Here  it  is  at  least  possible  that  this  slight,  his- 
torical survey  may  come  to  the  aid  of  the  inquirer,  in 
such  a  deadlock  as  I  have  indicated  between  the  views 
of  Mill  and  of  the  intuitionists  as  to  causation  ;  or 
between  the  views  of  Kant  and  of  his  opponents  as  to 
the  objective  character  of  space.  The  thinker  may 
come  to  the  conclusion  that  the  extensive  dogmatism 
of  medieval  philosophy,  which  tended  to  the  exag- 
geration of  the  mind's  powers  of  active  perception, 
had  led  to  a  violent  reaction,  in  which  the  analysis  of 
passive  impressions  as  the  exclusive  road  to  truth  had 
become  an  intellectual  fashion  ;  that  the  sober  com- 
mon-sense of  Locke  had  kept  this  tendency  from 
extremes ;  but  that  Berkeley  and  Hume,  each  in  his 
own  way,  had  carried  it  so  far  as  to  question  all  active 
elements  in  mental  perception.  This  extreme  had  in 
it  (our  thinker  may  conclude)  the  perverse  untruthful- 
ness of  an  exaggerated  reaction.  When  Hume 
"waked  Kant  from  his  dogmatic  slumbers,"  Kant  was, 
no  doubt,  considerably  affected  by  the  new  vividness 
with  which  Hume  and  Berkeley  had  brought  out  the 
extent  of  the  merely  phenomenal  in  our  knowledge ; 
and  though  Kant  was  too  clear-sighted  to  deny  to  the 
perception  of  geometrical  truths  the  character  of  syn- 
thetic a  priori  judgments,  he  was,  nevertheless,  so  far 
a  child  of  his  time  as  to  refuse  to  ascribe  an  objective 


436  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

character  to  our  perceptions  of  space — a  refusal  due  to 
the  pressure  of  an  intellectual  fashion  which  tended  to 
paralyze  confidence  in  the  active  perceptions  of  the 
mind,  and  in  its  power  of  knowing  any  objective  truth. 
In  a  similar  way,  the  student  contrasting  his  own 
sense  of  power  in  causing  the  movements  of  his  own 
body  with  Hume's  view  that  causation  is  mere  succes- 
sion, may  find  in  the  story  of  the  origin  of  empiricism 
good  ground  for  ascribing  Hume's  position  to  a  one- 
sided temper  of  mind — a  fashion  of  distrust  of  the 
mind's  active  powers — and  for  returning  to  the  intui- 
tive view.  That  the  empirical  temper  is  one-sided  he 
concludes  both  from  the  history  of  its  origin,  and  from 
the  fact  that  it  has  led  its  votaries,  in  their  distrust  of 
all  professed  intuitions,  to  positions  in  regard  to 
memory  and  to  necessary  truth  which  were  suicidal. 
Such  untenable  results  throw  grave  doubts  on  the 
initial  method  to  which  they  were  due,  and  discredit 
as  morbid  the  degree  of  questioning  and  caution  as  to 
the  mind's  spontaneous  decisions  to  which  empiricism 
leads. 

Here,  then,  are  two  instances  in  which  it  is  con- 
ceivable that  a  thinker  who  had  failed  to  make  the 
controversy  yield  a  satisfactory  issue  so  long  as  the 
method  of  self-introspection  had  been  exclusively 
applied,  may  come  to  a  definite  result  if  he  supple- 
ment the  individualist  method  by  the  social  and 
historical. 

And  surely  a  like  method  may  be  usefully  applied 
on  a  more  extended  scale. 

Passing  the  eye  along  the  history  of  philosophy, 
and  comparing  his  own  self-analysis  with  that  of 
others,  often  tracing  the  differences  to  ascertainable 
social   causes,   the  thinker  modifies  and  corrects  the 


PAPERS  READ  BEFORE  THE  SYNTHETIC  SOCIETY    437 

conclusions  which  commended  themselves  to  him 
while  he  adopted  the  purely  individualist  standpoint. 
The  ascertaining  of  the  causes  of  the  varying  convic- 
tions of  philosophers  at  least  gives  him  an  additional 
means  of  testing  his  own  accuracy.  So  far  as  they 
have  been  due  to  misunderstanding,  he  learns  to 
avoid  such  ambiguity  as  has  been  found  misleading. 
So  far  as  they  have  been  due  to  opposite  first 
principles,  he  learns  what  has  led  different  minds  to 
take  up  varying  positions  in  their  ultimate  decisions, 
and  what  tests  of  truth  or  falsehood  may  be  found  in 
the  causes  thus  discovered.  Even  in  the  present — 
and  apart  from  the  marked  differences  of  intellectual 
habit  which  history  presents  in  different  ages — a  man 
with  a  scholastic  education  differs  widely  from  one 
with  a  scientific  education.  The  one  from  his  de- 
ductive habit  readily  assumes  first  principles ;  the 
other  is  cautious,  ever  mindful  of  the  disillusions 
of  experience.  The  process  of  mutual  correction  by 
contact  between  such  minds  is  valuable.  Far  more 
valuable,  surely,  is  the  correction  of  individual  idio- 
syncrasy to  be  attained  by  the  study  of  the  history  of 
thought  all  along  the  line — that  is,  by  the  social  and 
historical  method. 

And,  it  may  be  added,  if  there  is  to  be  any 
progress  in  philosophy,  such  a  method  seems  to 
be  indispensable.  It  will  leave,  indeed,  a  sufficient 
number  of  deadlocks — of  inevitable  differences — to 
keep  up  the  distinction  of  schools  of  thought.  But 
to  register  the  lessons  of  experience — the  primary 
differences,  the  solved  problems,  the  explanations 
which  have  passed,  the  topics  which  still  appear  to 
offer  hope  of  further  elucidation — is  surely  essential  to 
real  progress.     Otherwise  history  blindly  repeats  itself 


438  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

We  each  knock  our  head  against  the  wall,  whose 
hardness  in  proportion  to  the  human  skull  has  been 
experienced  again  and  again  by  our  ancestors. 

No  doubt  a  man  must  ultimately  apply  his  re- 
searches to  his  own  mind ;  and  the  final  result  is  that 
he  gives  his  own  contribution  to  philosophy  based  on 
them  or  corrected  by  them.  Thus  he  returns  to  the 
individual  standpoint.  But  his  provisional  position, 
while  studying  the  variations  between  different  minds, 
is  different  from  the  standpoint  from  which  he 
analyzed  his  own  mind,  and  showed,  by  his  own 
analysis  of  it,  that  conclusions  common  to  him  and  to 
others  necessarily  presuppose  certain  first  principles 
which  must  therefore  be  admitted  by  all.  In  the 
latter  case  he  regards  the  decision  of  his  own  mind  as 
without  appeal  ;  in  the  former  he  is,  by  a  reflex  act, 
questioning  the  origin  and  working  of  his  own  mental 
machinery — and  this  by  comparing  it  with  other 
minds.  No  doubt  it  is  still  his  own  mind  which 
institutes  the  investigation  and  decides  as  to  its 
result ;  but  the  materials  it  uses  are  different,  and  are 
such  as  may  make  him  modify  his  former  decisions, 
and  enable  him  to  judge  of  their  value  from  a  wider 
survey. 

Of  course  it  may  be  said  that  in  the  very  act  of 
writing  down  your  own  analysis,  and  inviting  another 
to  give  his,  you  are  comparing  notes  and  taking  up  so 
far  a  social  and  not  a  purely  individual  standpoint, 
though  it  be  limited  to  a  comparison  between  two 
minds.  And  again,  by  the  fact  that  the  most  com- 
plicated studies  from  the  social  standpoint  issue  in  a 
conclusion  which  is  individual  to  yourself,  it  may  be 
shown  that  they  are  in  the  last  resort  only  the  materials 
for    an    individualistic    philosophy.      No   doubt    the 


PAPERS  READ  BEFORE  THE  SYNTHETIC  SOCIETY    439 

distinction  may  thus  be  made  to  vanish  ;  as  I  have 
fully  implied  in  my  former  paper.  But  considering  that 
the  processes  are  so  widely  distinct  in  kind,  the  one 
regarding  comparatively  and  from  outside  the  varia- 
tions of  thought  in  history  and  in  the  world,  the  other 
regarding  from  within  the  immediate  analysis  of  one's 
own  mental  operations,  and  considering  that  these 
two  ways  of  looking  at  the  problems  in  hand  are 
opposite  for  the  time  being,  and  mutually  corrective, 
it  seems  useful  to  contrast  the  standpoints,  while 
allowing  that  both  standpoints  are  taken  up  by  one 
individual. 

And  now  we  have  to  consider  the  fact  that  the 
social  standpoint,  first  suggested  by  the  differences 
between  philosophers  in  first  principles,  is  also  called 
into  request  by  the  actual  considerations  as  to  the 
scope  of  human  knowledge,  which  have  been  urged 
by  the  later  empiricists,  who  appeal  to  evolution. 
The  attempt  to  explain  the  intellectual  and  moral 
faculties  by  the  association  of  ideas  is  transferred  by 
them  from  the  history  of  the  individual  to  that  of  the 
race.  The  development  of  the  faculties  in  the  course 
of  evolution  is  considered.  Conscience  is  maintained 
to  be  an  instinct,  commanding  in  its  tone,  telling  what 
makes  for  the  life  of  the  race.  The  intellectual 
faculties  are  dealt  with  as  the  gradual  development, 
in  the  course  of  evolution,  of  the  sensible  faculties — 
not  different  from  them  in  kind. 

Then,  concurrently,  there  is  the  attitude  towards 
religious  conviction,  which  says,  in  effect,  "We  will 
not  attack  you  ;  we  will  explain  you."  We  have  the 
ghost  theory,  and  other  similar  theories,  to  account 
for  the  origin  of  belief  in  the  supernatural ;  and  the 
old  demarcation,  so  convenient  for   the   purposes   of 


44o  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

abstract  philosophical  discussion,  between  natural  and 
revealed  religion,  is  blurred  by  tracing  the  actual 
convictions  of  Christians  on  natural  religion  to  the 
influence  of  Christianity  itself,  while  the  Christian  evi- 
dences are  discredited  by  the  myth-theory  of  modern 
criticism. 

And  here  we  are  unable  to  escape  the  considera- 
tion of  the  social  and  historical  standpoint.  The 
allegation  is  that  in  fact  the  belief  in  Theism  and 
Immortality  in  a  large  number  of  men  is  due  to  the 
subtle  ethical  influences  of  a  Christian  society.  No 
doubt  we  may  reply  that,  allowing  this  to  be  so,  these 
beliefs  can  also  be  justified  by  a  true  philosophy  of 
the  human  mind,  which  leaves  these  special  influences 
out  of  account.  But,  as  St.  Thomas  Aquinas  says  in 
a  famous  passage,  such  a  philosophy  is  not  likely  to 
be  directly  influential  with  the  mass  of  men.  Granted 
even  that  it  is  the  justification  of  the  few  philosophical 
minds,  and  that  it  has  indirect  influence  on  the  less 
philosophical  through  their  instrumentality,  you  must 
perforce  consider  the  question,  How  far  has  the 
average  man  ground  for  believing  that  in  surrendering 
himself  to  this  influence  he  is  acting  wisely  and  reason- 
ably, and  in  a  way  which  gives  a  presumption  that  he 
will  not  be  misled  ?  And  here  we  are  again  driven 
to  the  social  standpoint. 

But,  in  point  of  fact,  besides  this  influence  of  the 
philosophical  few  on  the  many,  there  is  the  influence 
of  the  atmosphere — spread  by  Christianity  around 
each  unit  in  the  Christian  society — of  the  contagious- 
ness of  the  belief  of  his  fellows,  of  the  response  which 
the  truths  of  Natural  Religion  professed  by  the  com- 
munity find  in  his  own  moral  nature. 

It  would  surely  be  unsatisfactory  and  untrue  to 


PAPERS  READ  BEFORE  THE  SYNTHETIC  SOCIETY   441 

fact  to  dismiss  these  influences  as  simply  misleading, 
to  confine  the  philosopher's  efforts  to  an  abstract 
philosophy  of  the  individual  mind,  which  can  only 
really  satisfy  the  majority  in  consequence  of  their 
trust  in  those  who  expound  it ;  and  at  the  same  time 
to  exclude  entirely  from  the  sphere  of  rational  causes 
both  that  trust  itself  and  the  other  influences  which 
actually  sustain  the  belief  of  the  community. 

I  am  not  denying  that  there  is  a  process,  reason- 
able in  its  degree,  whereby  less  philosophical  minds 
do  rise  to  the  conception  of  God  apart  from  external 
teaching;  but,  in  point  of  fact,  man  lives  in  society 
and  cannot  be  independent  of  its  traditions,  which  he 
learns,  and  which  must  have  their  effect  on  his  beliefs. 
Therefore,  in  order  to  assure  the  average  man  that 
his  belief  is  well  founded,  it  is  useless  to  appeal  exclu- 
sively to  a  process  which  cannot  practically  take  place 
in  him — namely,  the  movement  of  his  mind  in  response 
to  the  visible  world  apart  from  any  social  influences. 
If  social  influences  for  or  against  belief  have  been 
acting  on  him  from  earliest  childhood,  and  if  inherited 
predispositions  are  likewise  due  to  external  influences 
exerted  on  his  ancestors,  he  cannot  appraise  the 
reasonableness  of  his  belief  without  in  some  degree 
estimating  the  value  of  these  influences,  which  effec- 
tively sway  his  mind  in  one  way  or  another. 

And  in  view  of  the  incompetence  of  the  average 
individual  to  do  this  in  a  trustworthy  fashion — to 
stand  outside  himself,  and  appraise  dispositions  which 
have  become  part  of  himself — we  are  led  to  the 
conception  of  a  Society  or  Church  in  which  the  more 
spiritual  and  profound  spirits  support  the  weaker  and 
guide  the  Society.  In  some  degree  the  inequality  of 
minds  is  compensated  by  the  influence  of  one  upon 


442  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

another.  A  schoolboy  can  learn  the  law  of  gravita- 
tion from  a  Newton,  and  be  taught  to  prove  it  by  his 
own  intellect.  But  he  could  not  have  discovered  it. 
Thus  the  greater  minds  bring  out  the  rational  faculties 
of  the  smaller ;  and  an  influence  in  one  sense  social 
gives  knowledge  which  is  truly  rational  in  the 
individual. 

And  this  may  surely  be  so  likewise  in  the 
philosophy  of  religion. 

If  a  true  philosophy  of  the  individual  mind  leads 
the  philosopher  to  attach  importance  to  the  moral 
intuitions,  to  the  sentiment  of  moral  approval  and 
disapproval,  to  the  more  complex  judgments  and 
sentiments  summed  up  in  the  word  "conscience";  if 
these  acts  or  phenomena  of  the  mind  form  an  im- 
portant link  in  the  chain  of  arguments  for  Theism  ; 
then  those  in  whom  the  moral  nature  is  more  highly 
developed — the  saints  and  moral  heroes — give  point 
and  additional  force  to  the  argument.  Society  gives 
in  a  more  unmistakable  form,  by  the  most  developed 
instances,  this  ethical  aspect  of  human  nature  which 
philosophy  considers  to  be  significant.  We  remember 
Browning's  account  of  the  momentary  flashes  of  the 
spiritual  nature  from  which  the  most  sceptical  are 
not  free  : 

Just  when  we  are  safest,  there's  a  sunset  touch, 

A  fancy  from  a  flower-bell,  some  one's  death, 

A  chorus-ending  from  Euripides — 

And  that's  enough  for  fifty  hopes  and  fears 

As  old  and  new  at  once  as  Nature's  self, 

To  rap  and  knock  and  enter  in  our  soul.  .  .  . 

It  is  tolerably  clear  that  such  glimpses  do  not 
necessarily  differentiate  themselves  unmistakably  from 
mere  excursions  of  the  imagination.     Place  him  who 


PAPERS  READ  BEFORE   THE  SYNTHETIC  SOCIETY   443 

experiences  them  in  isolation,  and  they  may  carry 
him  no  further.  They  are  glimpses  of  what  might 
be — "  the  Great  Perhaps  " — but  no  more.  They 
may  seem,  perhaps,  chiefly  suggestions  from  the 
aesthetic  nature  rather  than  from  the  deeper  moral 
conscience.  Place  him,  on  the  other  hand,  in 
contact  with  those  whose  ethical  perceptions  are 
steady  and  constant,  and  two  results  follow.  Firstly, 
his  own  moral  perceptions,  such  as  they  are,  assert 
themselves  more  distinctly  ;  and,  secondly,  he  comes 
to  attach  more  importance  to  them  by  seeing  the 
quality  of  more  developed  instances.  Tennyson 
expresses  this  in  the  Ancient  Sage.  The  dissolute 
sceptic  says  of  the  glimpses  of  moral  light  which  come 
to  him  : 

Idle  gleams  may  come  and  go, 
But  still  the  clouds  remain. 

The  Saintly  Seer  replies  : 

Idle  gleams  to  thee  are  light  to  me. 

And  he  suggests  that  their  significance  would  grow 
in  the  other  by  a  sustained  course  of  moral  action. 

Without  attempting  to  decide  on  the  rational 
value  of  this  element  in  the  basis  of  Theism,  it 
seems,  at  least,  clear  that  a  "  working  philosophy  "  of 
religious  belief  cannot  leave  out  of  account  what  has 
so  much  influence  as  a  cause  of  belief,  and  what  has 
certainly  in  it  at  least  some  of  the  rational  value 
attaching  to  the  argument  from  man's  moral  nature 
to  the  existence  of  a  moral  author  of  the  universe  and 
of  humanity.  To  reject  the  study  of  other  minds  in 
such  a  case,  and  to  confine  one's  self  to  the  individual 
mind — whose    moral    faculties    may    be    abnormally 


444  MEN  AND   MATTERS 

undeveloped — would  be  to  lose  sight  of  the  full  force 
of  the  argument. 

But  I  may  add — to  avoid  misunderstanding — that 
this  function  of  what  I  have  called  the  social  stand- 
point is  necessarily  guided  by  the  moral  intuitions  of 
the  individual  which  it  strengthens  and  confirms.  It 
is  not  to  a  merely  external  comparison  of  different 
manifestations  of  religion — to  an  exclusively  social 
method — that  I  have  appealed.  It  is  the  recognition 
that  perceptions  in  ourselves  have  their  counterpart 
more  highly  developed  in  others,  which  is  the  guide 
in  this  appeal  to  evidences  of  Theism  derived  from 
minds  other  than  our  own.  That  the  moral  con- 
sciousness is  significant  we  learn  from  our  personal 
experience — even  though  that  experience  be  due  in 
part  to  the  action  on  ourselves  of  greater  characters 
than  our  own.  The  degree  of  its  significance  may  be 
seen,  as  far  as  the  individual  is  capable  of  seeing  it, 
only  by  doing  his  best  to  use  his  mind  as  a  reflector 
of  the  higher  perception  of  others,  and  adding  to  his 
own  direct  perceptions  the  testimony  of  those  who  see 
more,  whom  he  can  reasonably  trust,  but  whose  direct 
knowledge  he  can  never  fully  share. 

In  the  considerations  I  am  here  suggesting  I  am 
raising  questions  which  it  would  carry  me  far  to  discuss 
fully.  But  I  trust  I  have  said  enough  to  show  that 
the  conception  of  gaining  aid  for  a  working  philosophy 
of  religious  belief  from  the  religious  experiences  of 
others  and  of  the  race  is  not  unreal  or  purely  mystical. 
If  we  have  any  faculties  which  lead  us  to  the  concep- 
tion of  God  as  the  ultimate  satisfaction  of  our  rational 
and  moral  nature,  we  are  more  likely  to  see  the  full 
significance  of  these  faculties  by  having  regard  to  men 
of  moral  genius,  than  by  looking  solely  at  ourselves 


PAPERS  READ  BEFORE  THE  SYNTHETIC  SOCIETY    445 

The  greatest  truths — scientific  and  mathematical — are 
known  to  the  individual  through  his  appreciation  of 
the  lead  which  genius  offers  to  give  him.  His  own 
faculties  are  educated  and  directed  by  studying  the 
mind  of  a  Newton  or  a  Laplace.  And  so  it  may  be 
with  religious  truth.  And  if  revelation  professes  to 
have  culminated  in  One  in  whom  an  absolutely  Divine 
nature  has  been  manifested,  and  whose  teaching  is 
calculated  to  draw  forth  moral  aspirations  and  percep- 
tions of  a  higher  order  than  any  which  mankind  had 
previously  known,  such  a  profession  would  be  in 
harmony  with  the  hierarchy  of  knowledge  and  the 
means  of  attaining  to  it  which  we  find  in  human 
society.  The  union  of  our  own  perception  with  trust 
in  the  guidance  of  One  who  sees  fully  and  clearly 
what  we  could  only  discern  imperfectly  and  by 
glimpses,  the  increased  confidence  in  our  own  glimpses 
due  to  His  fuller  explanation  of  their  sources  and 
import,  would  be  a  fresh  instance  of  an  order  of  Grace 
which  follows  more  perfectly  the  order  of  Nature. 


III.  MR.   HALDANE   ON  AUTHORITY  IN 
RELIGION  * 

How  far  would  the  lines  of  Mr.  Haldane's  paper 
on  "  Authority  in  Religion "  coalesce  with  a  line 
of  thought  suggested  by  the  evolution  theory  as 
explained  by  Spencer,  Huxley,  or  Wallace  ?  It  is 
an  Hegelian  saying  that  "  Nature  attains  to  self- 
consciousness  in  mind " ;  and  the  same  idea  may 
be    said    to   underlie   the    conception    of    evolution. 

1  This  is  a  criticism  on  a  paper  read  to  the  Society  by  the  present 
Lord  Haldane  in  February,  1897. 


446  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

From  the  development  of  the  lowest  forms  of  sentient 
life  onwards,  organic  evolution  is  the  gradual  un- 
folding of  the  universe  to  the  animal  consciousness. 
This  process  has  already  reached  the  comparatively 
rich  experience  of  man  ;  and  it  is  possible  enough  to 
conceive  of  it  as  indefinitely  continuing — and  issuing, 
in  fuller  and  fuller  manifestations  of  conscious  know- 
ledge, until  full  self-consciousness  should  be  attained 
by  nature,  and  the  subject,  having  got  rid  of  all  the 
limitations  attaching  to  knowledge  in  the  individual, 
should  find  itself  to  be,  as  Hegel  maintains,  identical 
with  the  object.  On  this  hypothesis,  experience  would 
be  the  "  ultimate  and  the  real,"  and  individual  self- 
consciousness  might  be  regarded  as  "a  phase  that 
comes  in  only  as  a  stage  in  the  logical  arrangement  of 
knowledge." 

But  leaving  this  imagined  conclusion  of  the  process 
out  of  the  question,  we  may  consider  the  process  itself. 
At  each  stage  of  this  growth  of  experience  from  the 
very  earliest,  the  question  stated  by  Mr.  Haldane 
arises,  "  To  what  extent  is  a  real  feature  in  experience 
being  recognized  ? "  There  is  at  each  stage,  as  the 
information  given  by  the  senses  becomes  wider,  the 
alternative — Is  this  new  phase  of  consciousness  fresh 
experience,  or  is  it  partly  (or  wholly)  an  illusion  ? 
And  the  question  which  concerns  us  here  is,  How  far 
are  the  ideas  of  God,  Freedom,  and  Immortality, 
which  have  arisen  so  generally  in  the  human  conscious- 
ness, truly  correlative  to  real  features  in  experience  ? 
Empirical  Agnosticism  would  regard  them  as  (so  far 
as  we  can  know)  mere  illusions.  Mr.  Haldane  claims, 
at  least,  that  they  are  "symbolical  of  a  beyond  to 
which  experience  points  us." 

Perhaps  some  light  as  to  the  true  interpretation  of 


PAPERS  READ  BEFORE  THE  SYNTHETIC  SOCIETY    447 

this  phase  in  human  consciousness  may  be  gained  by 
considering  an  earlier  stage  in  animal  experience. 
The  most  remarkable  transition  in  the  evolution  of 
sensible  experience  came  with  the  development  of 
sight,  which  has  given  to  sentient  beings  in  this  small 
planet  a  direct  relation  with  the  solar  system  and  fixed 
stars.  The  problem  of  the  origin  of  the  eye  gave 
Darwin  to  the  last,  he  used  to  say,  "a  cold  shiver," 
from  the  difficulty  of  accounting  for  the  origin  of  a 
sense  which  gave  ultimately  such  far-reaching  relations 
with  the  environment.  If  we  trace  the  eye  from  its 
earliest  rudiment  in  the  lower  forms  of  sentient  life — 
pigment  cells  covered  with  transparent  skin — to  the 
first  appearance  of  the  optic  nerve,  then  onward  to  the 
appearance  of  the  lens,  and  then  onward  to  the  com- 
plete vertebrate  eye,  it  is  clear  that  there  has  been  a 
gradual  advance  in  sensible  experience,  from  mere 
sensitiveness  to  light  to  a  confused  recognition  of 
external  objects,  which  steadily  became  more  and 
more  exact  until  it  reached  the  comparatively  perfect 
vision  of  our  own  eye.  It  is  tolerably  plain  that  at 
each  stage  there  was  a  growth  of  real  experience  and 
concurrently  a  growth  of  illusion.  Even  at  the  final 
stage  our  own  accurate  vision  gives  by  itself,  until 
corrected  by  reason  and  observation,  many  fresh 
illusions,  one  of  the  most  obvious  of  which  is  the  idea 
of  the  position  and  movement  of  the  stars  conveyed 
by  sight  alone.  Sight  so  rudimentary  that  it  could 
not  descry  the  stars  at  all  would  have  been  free  from 
these  particular  illusions.  To  other  optical  illusions 
also  individuals  are  liable,  as  in  judging  of  distances  ; 
to  others,  again,  from  special  defect,  as  with  the 
colour-blind.  Of  course  at  an  earlier  stage  there 
would  probably  be   illusions   as  to  the  distance  and 


448  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

position  of  neighbouring   objects,  still  more  marked 
and  more  various. 

If  we  conceive  rational  endowment  to  have  come 
at  a  low  stage  in  the  development  of  the  visual  organs 
—  for  instance,  if  we  imagine  the  first  appearance  of 
the  optic  lens  to  have  come  to  beings  with  minds — we 
should  have  in  some  respects  a  parallel  case  to  the 
present  one  of  our  religious  consciousness.  In  the 
early  stages  of  sensitiveness  to  light  there  might  have 
been  the  agnostics  as  to  vision.  They  might  have 
maintained  the  whole  of  this  new  kind  of  experience 
to  be  illusion.  Others,  noting  the  universality  of  the 
new  ideas  and  their  coincidence  with  undeniable 
experiences  in  touch,  might  have  maintained  that 
this  new  phase  (to  use  Mr.  Haldane's  expression) 
"  pointed  us  to  a  beyond,"  but  that  all  further  definition 
must  be  regarded  only  as  giving  "  symbolical  images." 

Here,  be  it  observed,  already  a  great  point  would 
be  won  beyond  the  admission  of  the  Agnostic.  If  my 
sight  of  the  stars  is  admitted  to  be  a  real  growth  of 
experience,  as  contrasted  with  the  lower  developments 
of  sight,  I  can  go  on  by  further  observation  and 
reasoning  to  correct  its  attendant  illusions,  to  reach  the 
Copernican  hypothesis — that  is,  to  ascertain  more 
exactly  what  knowledge  experience  does  give  by  its 
fresh  advance. 

And  so  too  in  religious  as  in  visual  experience  : 
once  we  admit,  as  Mr.  Haldane  does,  that  the  exist- 
ence of  a  reality  beyond  previous  stages  of  experience 
is  being  disclosed,  though  the  forms  in  which  we 
conceive  of  it  may  be  illusive  and  merely  pictorial,  we 
have  some  reason  for  hoping  that  illusion  may  be 
dispelled  and  the  nature  of  the  further  reality  more 
clearly  discerned. 


PAPERS  READ  BEFORE  THE  SYNTHETIC  SOCIETY    449 

And  it  is  here  that  I  should  endeavour  to  begin 
where  Mr.  Haldaneends.  He  notes  the  discrepancies 
of  the  symbolical  images  in  which  the  religious  con- 
sciousness expresses  itself — the  varying  theologies  and 
mythologies  of  different  times  and  places.  He  appears 
to  say — the  idea  of  a  Beyond  is  common  to  all,  there- 
fore it  is  valid ;  in  all  else  different  times  and  places 
present  different  conceptions,  therefore  all  else  is  made 
up  of  illusive  pictorial  forms. 

I  should  reply  that  once  we  admit  the  reality  of 
the  M  beyond,"  it  is  not  too  much  to  hope  by  comparison 
and  observation  to  do  something  towards  the  purifica- 
tion of  the  pictorial  forms  from  the  elements  of  illusion 
which  they  contain.  While  the  discursive  reason  and 
the  processes  of  observation  and  comparison  are 
powerless  to  attain  a  knowledge  new  in  kind,  they 
may  be,  here  as  elsewhere,  invaluable  in  correcting 
and  dispelling  illusions  in  experience  itself.  Reason 
and  observation  could  never  give  sight,  but  they  can 
correct  it.  Moreover,  the  development  of  visual 
experience  has  not  been  exactly  equal  in  all  indi- 
viduals at  the  various  stages  of  advance.  Comparing 
our  own  experience  with  that  of  others  whose  visual 
experience  is  more  developed  may  be  of  great  value 
in  interpreting  our  own. 

Thus,  instead  of  saying,  with  Mr.  Haldane,  that 
"  the  foundation  of  the  authority "  of  the  religious 
ideas  is  "no  more  than  this — that  they  are  symbolical 
of  a  beyond  to  which  experience  points  us,"  and  re- 
garding the  variety  of  religious  ideals  as  a  sign  that 
no  further  truth  is  attainable,  I  should  ask  if  we  can 
learn  no  further  lessons  as  to  the  new  reality — the 
beyond — parallel  to  those  which  rational  beings  with 
imperfect    sight   could    have    learnt   concerning   the 

2   G 


450  MEN  AND  MATTERS 

results  of  higher  visual  experience,  by  observation, 
reasoning,  and  intercourse  with  those  whose  visual 
faculties  were  more  developed  than  their  own.  I 
should  appeal  once  more  to  the  testimony  of  religious 
and  ethical  genius,  and  to  the  results  of  closer  obser- 
vation under  their  guidance.  And  here  an  argument 
urged  by  the  Bishop  of  Rochester1  and  Dr.  Bigg 
comes  to  the  rescue.  The  convictions  thus  gained 
would  receive  further  proof  from  the  fact  that  they 
give  coherency  and  definiteness  to  unmistakable  but 
only  rudimentary  perceptions  which  we  all  share  in 
common.  Some  of  these  Mr.  Haldane  himself  re- 
cognizes as,  at  all  events,  universal  and  fitting  in 
with  experience ;  for  instance,  the  reality  of  moral 
obligation. 

The  analytical  reason,  then,  has  for  its  task  the 
purification  from  illusive  elements  of  the  ideals  which 
arise  from  religious  experience.  And  this  (I  suggest) 
is  not  done  by  eliminating  as  illusive  what  all  minds 
do  not  yet  possess  in  common.  Such  a  process  would 
reject  new  knowledge  as  well  as  new  error.  The 
testimony  of  religious  genius  would  be  rejected  as 
well  as  the  eccentricity  of  the  fanatic.  A  more  dis- 
criminating scrutiny  is  required  to  discern  those  new 
perceptions  which  are  involved  in  the  genesis  of  very 
various  religious  ideas — perceptions  which  further 
define  the  reality  to  which  the  rudimentary  faculty 
common  to  all  obscurely  points. 

And,  if  this  is  so,  we  may  come  to  recognize 
advancing  accuracy  of  religious  knowledge — an  indi- 
cation of  the  true  nature  of  the  beyond  of  which 
Mr.  Haldane  speaks — in  the  gradual  development  of 
the   idea   of    a    Deity    or   deities    into   that   of    one 

1  Dr.  Talbot,  now  Bishop  of  Winchester. 


PAPERS  READ  BEFORE    THE  SYNTHETIC  SOCIETY  451 

Personality,  the  realization  of  our  ideal  of  moral  good. 
Religious  evolution  on  this  hypothesis  becomes,  like 
evolution  in  other  departments,  a  gradual  increasing 
adaptation  of  the  mind  to  reality.  Mr.  Haldane's 
pictorial  forms  remain,  indeed,  to  the  end  partly 
symbolical  and  untrue,  but  yet  the  necessary  vehicle 
of  new  truths,  containing  the  illusion  attendant,  in  this 
as  in  other  cases,  on  advance  towards  a  higher  stage 
of  experience.  Every  such  advance,  while  it  helps 
to  correct  the  illusions  proper  to  an  earlier  stage, 
brings  also  its  own  indistinct  perceptions — the  rudi- 
ments of  a  still  higher  phase,  which  for  a  time  the 
imagination  fills  up  with  illusive  pictures  or  the  reason 
completes  with  inaccurate  deductions. 


THE    END 


I'RINTED    BV    WILLIAM    CLOWES   AND   SONS,    LIMITED,    LONDON   AND   BECCLES. 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  AT  LOS  ANGELES 

THE  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 
This  book  is  DUE  on  the  last  date  stamped  below 


APR  2  6  19771 


20m-12,'30(3as«) 


3  1158  00087  0682 


UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 


A  A      000  038  655   7 


